Last year around this time, a small scandal erupted concerning the use of AI to process Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent in The Brutalist (Brady Corbet). That caught my attention. I interviewed Brody and politely asked him about the accent. He explained that he had been inspired by the speech of his Hungarian grandfather. Later, however, I spoke with the Ukrainian AI company Respeecher, which had helped director Brady Corbet recreate that very accent. Their account contradicted Brody’s. It seemed likely that Brody himself hadn’t realised what had been done to his voice in post-production.

In any case, this glimpse into the new AI world fascinated me. During one of our conversations, Anastasiia Khafiichuk, the manager of Holywater (which specialises in vertical AI products) asked me: “By the way, do you have any idea for an AI film? We want to submit something to the Runaway AI Film Festival in Los Angeles, but we don’t have any ideas yet, and the deadline is fast approaching…”

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My family journey

I thought about it and proposed adapting one of my short stories, Banana. The story is about my sister, who chose to remain in our hometown of Sumy, Ukraine, during the war. It reflects my personal experience as a refugee and highlights my sister’s courage in refusing to exchange her homeland for a new life in Berlin, as I did. Anastasiia and her team (producers Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov) liked the idea and decided to develop it further, asking me to suggest some visual concepts. Unfortunately, that was not my strength, so director Illia Dutsyk rewrote the script and created his own visualisation. Still, I was credited as the originator of the idea.

In June, our film Distance Between Two Points of Me was shown at AI film festivals in both New York and Los Angeles, where the jury was headed by Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé. The film received a Special Mention. That became my first real experience of working on an AI-driven film.

A week ago, at the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice, I had the chance to speak with Charlie Fink – Forbes columnist, AR/VR/AI guru, and professor at Chapman University Film School. Fink explained that what he teaches his students is not really about AI at all, but about the timeless craft of visual storytelling. For him, the real challenge is not mastering the technology, but learning how to shape an idea into a story that audiences will care about.

“You know, what I’ve learned teaching cinematic AI is that I’m just teaching,” Fink said. “It’s just about telling stories with pictures instead of words. And students are still learning that. The biggest challenge is to help them tell their stories in a visual way. The AI is only the tool. What really matters is the creation process — taking an idea, turning it into a script, breaking it into shots, and then solving all the problems along the way. But at the core, it always goes back to the story. Technology is not the thing itself. Technology should be invisible to the audience. They should only care about what happens to the characters next.”

Hearing him speak confirmed my own experience: the strength of an AI film begins with the clarity of its idea. Without that, the most advanced tools amount to nothing more than spectacle.

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AI and Venice

The 2025 Reply Festival in Venice proved that AI in cinema is no longer a futuristic curiosity but a working creative partner. With over 2,000 submissions in the cinematic AI category, the event highlighted how software is moving from tool to co-pilot.

The Grand Prize of €8,000 went to Love at First Sight by Jacopo Reale (pictured at the top of this article), a meditation on imagination and fleeting emotion. “AI lets me distill stories to their essence, giving rhythm and meaning to images that don’t exist… yet somehow still break your heart,” Reale said. Second place went to Mark Wachholz’s The Cinema That Never Was, where AI became his “co-archaeologist of imagination.” Andrea Lommatzsch took third with Un Rêve Liquide. Special awards went to Marcello Junior Costa’s Instinct and Shanshan Jiang’s Clown, underlining the range of AI cinema – from pure technical experiment to deeply human storytelling.

Industry veterans framed the festival as a turning point. Rob Minkoff, co-director of The Lion King, called this year’s entries “a glimpse of what will be possible in the future”. Dave Clark, founder of Promise, added: “You wouldn’t even believe it was done with a machine.” For him, AI is a Swiss Army knife of film production—capable of condensing workflows once requiring entire studios. Still, he cautioned that photorealism remains a challenge: “2D animation is safe… photorealistic look? Not quite there yet.”

Charlie Fink explained how filmmaking is shifting toward precision-driven, animation-first methods: “You set the shot length before you animate, so you know exactly how many frames you’ll need.”

But amid technical marvels, one theme echoed: story remains central. Filippo Rizzante, CTO at Reply, summed it up: “It’s not only about having the technical capability of using those AI tools. You still need a good story, good storytelling… to define characters.” If the Reply Festival revealed anything, it’s that AI won’t replace cinema’s human core – it’s here to amplify creativity, accelerate production, and expand the canvas for stories yet to be imagined.

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No replacement for humans

What makes AI so fascinating, then, is not the novelty of the tool but the way it reframes the creative process. It forces both filmmakers and audiences to ask: what is it that truly makes a story resonate? Is it the technology that renders it, or the human idea that sparks it? Festivals like Reply demonstrate that AI can strip away routine obstacles and free creators to focus on the essence of cinema—emotion, rhythm, and character.

For me, this is why AI feels worth paying attention to. It is neither a gimmick nor a threat, but an amplifier of imagination. It doesn’t erase the human role; it sharpens it. The technology may evolve, the workflows may change, but the heart of storytelling remains stubbornly human. And in that tension—between algorithm and instinct, between machine precision and human messiness—lies a new frontier for cinema that is as unsettling as it is exciting.