Best AI Film
The film of the evening. Chosen across everything on the programme: the one that earns its place on a screen in front of strangers, wherever its pixels came from.
15 November2026
Films made with machines, shown in a room full of people.
Sunday, 4 to 6 PM
Freed Spaces, 1030 6th Avenue, Midtown Manhattan
The evening
Every film that reaches us has travelled a long way around. We built one evening for the landing.
Look up from Sixth Avenue on a November afternoon and the moon is sometimes already out, pale above the towers, keeping its distance from everything that hurries beneath it. A film made with AI has something of that distance. It has passed through prompts, models, rejected takes, a few thousand regenerations and one stubborn person who decided it was finished.
Independent, here, means nobody commissioned it: no studio, no platform brief, no client waiting on an invoice. AI means the tools are part of the making, said out loud rather than whispered about. Generated images, synthetic voices, machine-assisted edits, whatever shaped the film. We care less about which model you used than about whether somebody is plainly steering it.
On Sunday, November 15, 2026, from 4 to 6 PM, the selected films play on one screen at Freed Spaces, 1030 6th Avenue, fifth floor. Directors who can make it join a Q&A once the last film ends. After that, the evening stays unscheduled on purpose, for talking, swapping contacts and finding out who else in the room is making something strange.
Eight awards are given.
Awards
Best Cinematography
Light, lens and framing, whether they were pointed, prompted or painted. Goes to the film that looks as if someone chose every frame.
Best Animation
Drawn, sculpted, simulated or generated, as long as it moves like it means it.
Best Experimental Work
For the film that does not know what it is yet and is better for it. Rules bent in the open are welcome.
Best Director
The clearest hand on the wheel. Pacing, performance and the thousand small refusals that keep a machine-assisted film from drifting into noise.
Best Screenplay
Words first. A story that would still hold if you took every image away and read it aloud in a quiet room.
Best Sound and Music
Score, voice, room tone. For the film that sounds as deliberate as it looks.
Best Documentary
True places and real people, told with or around the machines. The honest-eye prize.
Winners
Best AI Film
BLACK COFFEE - Muzappar Osman
Best Cinematography
LILITH - Melisandra Shen, Forest Hills
Best Animation
Lunar Battle Chess - Alex Stennett, Fort Lauderdale
Best Experimental Work
THREE AWAKENINGS - Xinyi Zhang & Qianhan Dong, Jersey City
Best Director
Hyman Schwartz is AI - Dave Spector, Brooklyn
Best Screenplay
Review - Jonathan Zarantonello, Los Angeles
Best Sound and Music
Time After Time - Eunkyung Ko, Gangnamgu
Best Documentary
From Paris to Chungking ~Aimee Rowland’s Incredible Journey~ - Noelle Rowland, Tokyo
Rules
Send us a film that runs 20 minutes or less, credits included, finished on or after January 1, 2025. Any genre is welcome, from a one-minute fable to a drama that nearly fills the limit. The one thing we insist on is that AI was used in making it, for pictures, voices, music, writing or editing, and that you tell us where on the submission form. Fully generated and lightly assisted films sit side by side in the same programme.
Spoken English is simplest. Any other language needs English subtitles, either in the picture or as a separate file. A premiere is not required, and films that have already played other festivals are welcome. Each film is its own submission: if you have three, you submit three times. You must hold every right needed to show it, including music, voices, footage and the licence terms of whichever tools produced it. If a tool's terms forbid public screening, we cannot show the film.
Send a link we can watch in 1080p or better through FilmFreeway. Selected films are projected from a file, so we may ask for a download at that point. The programme is put together by people, not a script, and its decisions are final. Anything hateful, unlawful or plainly cruel will not be shown, and we do not explain refusals one by one.
Venue
Sunday
November 15
4 to 6 PM, 2026
Freed Spaces
1030 6th Ave, 5th floor
New York, NY 10018
United States
1030 6th Ave, 5th floor
New York, NY 10018
United States
Send your film through FilmFreeway. Questions about the evening go to contact@nycaiawards.com.