The Astana AI Film Festival has started its three-day final in Kazakhstan's capital, with 25 films left in competition out of 8,067 entries from 125 countries. Day one, October 1, was a closed screening of finalists by makers from the US, Canada, Italy, South Korea, China and Kazakhstan. After that the films open to everyone: they play on the big screen at the Chaplin cinema in Astana's MEGA Silk Way centre on October 2 and 3, with tickets sold through Kino.kz and the Freedom SuperApp, and the winners are named on the last day.
The finalists cover 19 genres and were made with more than 80 generative models, and everything entered came to over 100,000 minutes of film. The US$2 million fund is split down the middle. Half is prize money from the Freedom Shapagat foundation of Timur Turlov's Freedom Holding. The other half is investment for promising AI teams, put up by Balaji Srinivasan, the former Coinbase CTO and a16z partner who founded The Network School, and meant to build up film production and the AI sector in Kazakhstan.
Srinivasan also sits on the international jury, alongside former UNESCO chief and French culture minister Audrey Azoulay, Ma Ping of China Film Group's AI research institute, Wang Hao of the Beijing Film Academy's animation faculty, and Li Long, who runs BytePlus for the Middle East, Africa, India, Turkey and the CIS. Freedom Holding is the general partner, The Network School the technology partner and Kino.kz a partner as well.
The final is part of Kazakhstan's AI Month and the AI & Digital Bridge 2026 tech conference. At the opening, much of the attention went to what the tools add in visual effects, imagery and storytelling. One viewer told UzDaily the films showed how far AI stretches what filmmakers can attempt, some standing out for spectacle and others for odd, original storytelling, but said a real story and feeling still have to sit underneath the effects.
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