Astana, Kazakhstan: The Astana AI Film Festival (AAIFF 2026) has officially secured its place as the world’s largest international competition for AI cinema, drawing an unprecedented 8,067 submissions from 125 countries, according to Qazinform news agency.
Kazakhstan ranks second in the number of submissions with 829 films, behind the United States with 1,395 entries.
India submitted 702 entries, followed by China (550) and South Korea (349). The top ten also includes the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil, and France.
Notably, nearly 40 per cent of the films, totalling 3,138 entries, explored the festival’s central theme – ‘The Future Worth Living In’. Another 4,929 works were submitted for the open competition, which covers 19 genres and has no thematic restrictions.
Speaking on the milestone, AAIFF Board co-founder and chairman Almaz Zhali said, “Just a few months ago, we were launching an international competition, and today we have received more than 8,000 entries from 125 countries. These are no longer isolated AI experiments. We are seeing full-fledged films, complex stories, characters and entire universes,” as quoted by Qazinform.
AAIFF co-founder and creative director Aizatulla Khussain shared that the festival’s idea emerged in Astana in December 2025.
“We can now state clearly that the Astana AI Film Festival is the world’s largest AI film festival, both in terms of its $2 million funding and the number of submissions. We entered the market at the right time, just as technologies capable of producing real films began to emerge,” he said.
The submitted entries will undergo several stages of screening, beginning with checks for plagiarism and low-quality AI-generated content. Films that pass the initial review will be assessed by specialists with experience in cinema and visual storytelling.
Around 150 works will reach the festival’s senior selection team, where 25 finalists will be chosen.
The festival offers a $1 million prize pool, including $750,000 for its main thematic program and $250,000 across five open categories. The submitted films have a combined runtime exceeding 100,000 minutes and were created by 4,756 filmmakers using over 80 generative models.
