Looking For Perseida

Looking For Perseida is a twelve-minute AI-made science-fiction short film written and directed by Ernest Desumbila, a filmmaker based in Barcelona. It was released in 2026 and Desumbila posted the full film on YouTube, where it is tagged #specialforaaiff, a nod to the Astana AI Film Festival it was made for. The upload's copyright line reads 2026 Ernest Desumbila.

The upload's credits describe a mix of AI tools and human crew. Character design was made with GPT2 and Google's Nano Banana Pro, and the video was generated with Seedance 2.5 by Desumbila, who also graded the colour. Voices were generated with ElevenLabs by sound designer Joao Teixeira. Music is credited to Desumbila, with AI-assisted composition and production in Suno; the film also features the songs "AH-RA-KA" by Detroit Dolphins and "Love Is the Last Signal" by Chrome Horses, and "Her Name Was Perseida" composed by Elias Goku Vesper. Visual effects and compositing are credited to Juan Gorospe, Guillem Maresma and Yukio Montilla.

The credits name Artificial Fried Chicken as the AI lab and Magnific as the AI creative platform. Yukio Montilla produced, Eva Laffitte was executive producer, Teixeira edited, Llorenc Peris did the final mix and Luis Suasi made the credits. The description ends with a joke: no dolphins were harmed in the making of the film.

Desumbila told Qazinform that his wife told him about the festival only ten days before the deadline. He first thought it impossible, then locked himself at home and made the film in those ten days. The festival theme, "The Future Worth Living In", gave him an image of a rainy scene as the ending, and he built the story back from it.

The first Astana AI Film Festival ran on 1 to 3 October 2026, with finalists screened on 2 and 3 October at the Chaplin cinema in MEGA Silk Way. It drew 8,067 entries from 125 countries, and 25 films reached the final programme. Looking For Perseida was one of ten films in the main competition and took third place and US$100,000, behind Nikolay Shestak's The First Honest Day (Grand Prix, US$450,000) and Abhik Banerjee's SITARA (US$200,000). The record shows the YouTube upload at 54,821 views on 6 October 2026. Desumbila said the award motivated him to keep developing projects, and that his long-term goal is a feature film, with several in progress.

The festival's organizers call it the largest AI film festival in the world, a claim Euronews attributes to co-founder Aizat Kussainov and does not verify. Its total fund was US$2 million, half prize money and half investment for AI teams in Kazakhstan, and its jury included Audrey Azoulay, the former UNESCO Director-General. Euronews says films were judged on artistic vision, storytelling and how organically AI was woven into the idea, not only on which tools were used.