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THE SEPTEMBER 28 2025 FILM FESTIVAL
AI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL UNVEILS PIONEERING WINNERS, SHAPING THE FUTURE OF CINEMA
Hollywood, CA - The AI International Film Festival announced the winners of its September 28 program, showcasing the vanguard of creative expression at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence.
Chosen from 101 entries spanning 27 countries, the festival screened nine transformative, AI-related short films that redefine passionate storytelling for the 21st century.
An enthusiastic crowd gathered at the classic Los Feliz Theatre to celebrate the cutting-edge brilliance of tomorrow's filmmakers, followed by an exclusive After-Party networking event at Los Angeles’ hippest diner, Fred62.
SEPTEMBER 28 2025 WINNERS
“Close Enough” - Alex Hunter - Germany 2025 - 10 min - US Premiere - AWARDS: Best Experimental
Does your relationship provide everything you need?
"Close Enough" by Alex Hunter is a deeply avant-garde, experimental piece with a heartbeat of its own, uncategorized, unapologetic, and strangely familiar. It doesn’t tell a story so much as evoke a state: the liminal, ghostly feeling of hotel rooms as sites of suspended identity and fleeting intimacy. Through AI-manipulated images fed from both luxury hotels and personal archives, the film becomes a meditation on memory, desire, and the loneliness beneath surface freedom.
It’s speculative, raw, and dreamlike, full of imperfections that may be accidental or entirely intentional, but either way they feed its eerie sincerity. This is cinema that bypasses logic and speaks directly to our unspoken longings, the ones we ignore in our rush to get from where we are to where we’re going. It may be loved or loathed, but either way, it lingers under your skin. And that, perhaps, is its quiet triumph.
“Not Endings Not Beginnings” - Edyta Jadowska - Poland 2025 - 1 min - World Premiere- AWARDS: Best Story
What is the battle between the dreamer and the realist like?
"Not Endings Not Beginnings" by Edyta Jadowska is a small but resonant piece... subtle, poetic, and deeply human. While one partner daydreams of prehistoric romance and cosmic intimacy, the other can’t stop checking for phone signal. The film becomes a metaphor for modern relational limbo, two people drifting physically together but emotionally elsewhere.
The narration, delivered with a soft Polish dialect, adds unexpected depth and authenticity. It's a short dream, but a rich one, playing with time, illusion, and connection with surprising clarity. Beautifully executed and quietly profound, this is AI filmmaking used not for spectacle, but for soul.
“Before My Silence” - Axel Schilling - Germany 2025 - 4 min - World Festival Premiere - AWARDS: Best International Short, Best Picture. AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARDS: Best Message
What can a 100-year old lady tell us?
"Before My Silence" by Axel Schilling is a haunting and exquisitely executed short that feels impossibly real, so much so that it’s hard to believe it’s AI-generated. A woman in a wheelchair, facing the sea one final time, becomes the quiet symbol of resistance, memory, and endurance. Her voice, in German, adds weight and history; the subtitles make sure we don’t look away.
The performance is subtle, but the tension is profound, especially in the unspoken possibility that she may let herself go. It has the tone of a mockumentary, but the emotional pull of something sacred. Stylish in its stillness and deeply tuned to invisible pain, this is a masterful use of simplicity to say something vast and necessary.
“胡蝶之夢: The Butterfly Dream” - Suhyeon Scholastica Jin, Aria Suhyun Kim, Hyunjoo Park - Korea 2025 - 3 min - AWARDS: Best Narrative Short
What does it matter what's illusion and what's reality?
A dreamy, philosophical short inspired by the Taoist parable questioning reality and illusion. Through poetic visuals and introspective voiceover, the film asks: does it even matter if this is real? A thoughtful, stylish piece that walks the edge of existential musings without falling into pretension. The voiceover and acting are well-paired, enhancing the film’s emotional and intellectual rhythm. It doesn’t try to answer the question, it invites you to smile at it.
An elegant, entertaining meditation on existence. Minimal but meaningful. Strong voice. Resonant.
“Color of My Garden” - Roy Oh - Korea 2025 - 25 min - AWARDS: Best Documentary
What's Frida Kahlo’s life like?
"Color of My Garden" feels like an AI-remake of Frida Kahlo’s life, not in the traditional sense of a remake, but in the way dreams remake memory: surreal, fragmented, reverent, and slightly untamed. Clearly inspired by the 2002 feature film Frida starring Salma Hayek, this short walks a familiar path through the artist’s storied life, her illnesses, betrayals, and passions, but reinterprets it with the hallucinatory brushstrokes of machine vision.
The visual language is its own: compositions are beautifully rendered, colors rich, and stylistic transitions imaginative, sometimes echoing Frida’s own paintings.
he overall experience is compelling, especially for those unfamiliar with her life story. Frida’s resilience, eccentricity, and luminous pain radiate through, reminding us that art can grow from devastation, and that the garden of her life remains in bloom, even when remixed by machines.
“ZERO” - Dongha Oh - Korea 2025 - 6 min - World Premiere - AWARDS: Best Hybrid AI Film, Best Director, Best Screenwriting, Best Drama
What happens to the human ego when it no longer holds the pen?
Zero presents a richly layered, well-crafted narrative that doesn’t just ask whether AI can write, it asks what happens to the human ego when it no longer holds the pen. The premise is gripping: a celebrated novelist, crushed by the news that an AI named Zero has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, spirals into existential despair and seeks out the machine’s creator for answers.
Zero shows us the future of Literature, and also holds a mirror to us humans. Easy and at the same time somewhat disturbing to watch, it illuminates the core questions of Intellectual Property and identity in the time of AI
“Between Spaces” - Bryan Ebzery - United States 2025 - 9 min - World Festival Premiere - AWARDS: Best AI Short, Best AI Warfare. AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARDS: Best Film, Best Use of AI, Most Fun, Most Surprising
What connects childhood dreams and the bitter reality of war?
A surreal AI-generated meditation on childhood awe, memory, and dreamspace, where plastic toy soldiers march through shifting landscapes of myth and loss.
Subtle and stunning. No dialogue needed, visual storytelling speaks volumes. Toy figures with uncanny emotional expressions carry surprising depth. Nonlinear structure mirrors how dreams feel and how memory fades. Music choices elevate the emotional pull, but may raise copyright questions unless sourced from public domain or licensed libraries.
Metaphors like the jellyfish and balloons are layered and poetic, leaving just enough space for the viewer to fill. A hauntingly effective, beautifully crafted short. Emotionally resonant, stylistically consistent, and dreamlike in the most grounded way. One of the month’s strongest.
“Robin” - Barney Miller - United States 2025 - 5 min - AWARDS: Best Message, Best Screenplay
What does history say about us?
“Robin” by Barney Miller may be a retelling, but it’s no bedtime story. It’s a scalpel, not a sword, cutting through the legend to expose the rotten, human core of power itself. The narrator’s voice is absolutely delicious, smooth, intimate, quietly damning, like power whispering its confessions right into your ear. That “It’s not you, it’s me” framing flips everything on its head. Power owns the story. It’s not about justice anymore, but about the slow seduction of control.
The AI-enhanced visuals serve the metaphor well, polished, eerily timeless, like a fairy tale under surveillance. Technically clean, emotionally tight. It doesn’t overreach or overexplain. It trusts the viewer to feel the weight. This isn’t just about history. It’s a mirror held to any of us who think we’re the exception. You want to be the hero? Check your shadow first.
“The Wrong Visitor” - Harry Hyun - Korea 2025 - 12 min - AWARDS: Best AI Film
What if the wrong visitor is sent to the gates of hell?
"The Wrong Visitor" by Harry Hyun comes with no official description, but the story reveals itself with quiet clarity. A wolf, representing the Chinese zodiac sign and possibly the guardian of death or the gatekeeper of hell, encounters a young sheep-like child, a human soul mistakenly at the gates.
Despite its minimal setup, the film delivers an emotionally resonant experience, with acting that captures subtle layers of boredom, despair, confusion, and joy. The metaphorical framing; life, death, mistaken visitors, feels spiritually coherent and visually grounded.
Even without full context, the story holds up, offering a strange but polished meditation on mercy, fate, and the space between worlds. There are souls in that version of hell and this short gives them just enough voice to matter.