Ten finalists have been selected for the third Reply AI Film Festival, an international competition that merges cinema and artificial intelligence. The short films were chosen from more than 3,000 submissions originating across 76 countries. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on Sunday, 6 September, on the Lido during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
The festival, created by Reply, invites filmmakers and digital artists to experiment with AI tools across every stage of production, from screenwriting to post-production. This year's entries responded to the theme "Imaginatio Nova," exploring how human creativity and technology can produce new visual languages. A jury chaired by Oscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores will select the top film and two special award recipients.
Jury and awards
Alongside the Best Short Film award, the competition will present the AI for Good Award, promoted with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), for the work that best interprets the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Reply AI Studios Grand Prix will go to the project demonstrating the highest level of innovation in its use of AI throughout the creative process. Jury members include Rob Minkoff, Catherine Hardwicke, Jed Weintrob, Giacomo Mineo, and others from film production, journalism, and technology.
The ten finalists
The short films employ a wide range of generative tools to overcome budget constraints, recreate historical settings, or build complex visual worlds that would be difficult to realize with traditional methods. The finalists are:
- A Face Only A Mother Could Love - Robert Gaudette (Canada). A solitary Parisian dancer is drawn out of isolation through an unexpected connection in a park. AI tools included Grok, Nano Banana, and Seedance.
- Centenarian Kindergarten - 2xLabs (China). In a future without births, four 100-year-olds flee a facility where AI enforces compulsory happiness. Created with Nano Banana Pro and Jimeng SeedAce 2.0.
- GO HOME - Simone Paradiso (Italy). Four teenagers in 1999 New York discover a military bunker, triggering a sci-fi adventure. Higgsfield Soul Cinema, GPT Image 2.0, and Seedance 2.0 were used.
- Kev - Mike Bennion (UK). An intimate portrait of a blind man's relationships and daily life, made possible with Midjourney, Nano Banana, Kling, Veo 3, and ElevenLabs.
- Le Drip - Alex Naghavi and Ezra Li (Australia/USA). Living oil paintings depict Earth's final day, animated with Flora, Nano Banana, Claude, Seedance, and Runway.
- Little Mes - Salad Collective (Spain). An inner monologue explores parallel lives coexisting in a single moment, built on Kling, Veo 3.1, Seedance, and Suno.
- Once Upon a Time on the Dnieper River - Yi Wang (China). A soldier on the Russian-Ukrainian front receives a dangerous mission. Scenes were generated with Nano Banana, Dreamina, and Vidu.
- Passenger - Yuanbo Song (China). A tsunami survivor uncovers a truth behind an intruder's destruction of her parents' sculptures. Runway Gen 4.5, Higgsfield, Seedance 2.0, and Kling 3.0 were used.
- The Child of the Sea - Ibai Abad (Spain). A fish-boy travels 17th-century Spain seeking his mother, realized through a hybrid stop-motion and AI workflow with Magnific.
- Website - Jiaze Li (China). A speculative film about a platform broadcasting events from other worlds, created with Veo 3, Runway, Kling, and Seedance 2, plus an interactive web experience.
Public voting and community award
Until 1 September, the public can watch the ten films on aiff.reply.com and WeShort. Viewers can vote for their favorite, and the top choice will receive the Community Award, presented in collaboration with WeShort. The initiative is part of Reply's Challenges programme, a network of technology competitions that now involves nearly 250,000 participants globally.
Why this matters for creatives
The festival provides a clear view of how Generative Video tools are shifting the economics of short-film production. Filmmakers with no budget, cast, or crew are building intricate narratives-dystopian futures, 17th-century settings, painterly animations-that previously required expensive VFX or physical sets. For creatives, the competition signals which platforms and workflows are gaining traction: the finalists' toolkits include Runway, Kling, Veo, Nano Banana, and Seedance, among others. Understanding how to combine these tools is becoming a practical skill for independent storytellers. The festival also highlights the growing intersection of AI with social impact, as seen in the AI for Good Award, which ties directly to UN sustainability goals. For anyone working in AI for Creatives, the shortlisted works serve as a benchmark for what small teams can achieve when they treat AI as a core production medium rather than a novelty.
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