Kazakhstan's Astana AI Film Festival says 4,756 creators in 125 countries sent in 8,067 films for its first competition, more than 100,000 minutes of work in all. The organisers gave the figures at a briefing in the capital ahead of the October 1 to 3 event, which carries $2.75 million in prizes and investment. Co-founder and board chairman Almas Zhali said the competition had only been announced a few months earlier, and that the entries were full films with characters and invented worlds rather than isolated experiments.
The entries divide between a themed strand, The Future Worth Living In, with 3,138 films, and an unrestricted open competition with 4,929. American creators sent the most (1,395), followed by Kazakhstan (829), India (702), China (550) and South Korea (349). The UK, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and France were also among the biggest senders. The work spans 19 genres, the longest film runs just over four hours, and one project stitches together five separate fictional universes. Entrants used AI for storytelling and world-building as well as for the pictures themselves.
By the organisers' estimate, entrants spent more than $4 million across more than 80 generative tools, with Suno, Seedance 2.5, Kling, Wan 2.6, GPT Image 2 and ElevenLabs used most. Every film goes through a mandatory plagiarism check. Alongside newcomers and small independent teams, known names on the list include The DOR Brothers, Zack London's Gossip Goblin project and Robert Gaudette.
The themed competition shares $1.75 million and five open categories share $250,000. A further $1 million fund, supplied by former Coinbase technology chief Balaji Srinivasan, is meant to keep selected teams producing from Kazakhstan, with a path into the Astana Hub technology park. Hussein said the point of the separate fund is that strong projects should carry on after the awards rather than stop there.
Co-founder Aizatulla Hussein said the submissions show AI cinema has no settled form yet: some makers copy conventional films, others produce work that barely resembles cinema at all. He saw national habits, with South Korean entrants drawn to noir, horror and office settings, Chinese creators to animation, and Kazakh ones to the steppe, yurts and robots. He added that trends now shift almost daily, and that it is still hard to say where AI-made entertainment content ends and AI cinema begins. He hopes the festival helps pin down the form, and perhaps a name for it.
Finalists will see their films on a big cinema screen in Astana for the first time, as part of a wider AI Month with business sessions and masterclasses. Winners are named on October 3.
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