AI Film Festival Japan opens with 730 entries from 60 countries

The second AI Film Festival Japan opened in Tokyo on Saturday with 68 official selections and 21 finalists drawn from more than 730 submissions across more than 60 countries, and the winners are announced on Sunday.

The festival runs October 31 to November 2 at the Tokyo Innovation Base in Yurakucho, its first three-day edition. The organizer, AI Film Japan Inc., published the official selections and finalists ahead of the opening, and the awards ceremony is scheduled for November 1 from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the venue.

Three things changed from the 2025 debut. The event has expanded from a weekend into three days with parallel industry and creator tracks. It has added an AI Film Music Score category, judged on its own, in which entrants score a supplied one-to-three-minute clip. And it has signed Alibaba Cloud, CapCut and ElevenLabs as official partners, with CapCut running an AI Creative Award across seven films and ElevenLabs presenting a Best Use of Voice award across ten.

The three-day program is built around screenings of the nominated and finalist work, with 14 industry sessions on co-productions, Japanese intellectual property and legal rights in the AI era, plus creator demos. The creator track includes a special screening of the Iranian short "The Last Class" and a demo from CyberAgent's creative team, and the industry track lists an online keynote from the two-time Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett.

The finalist slate is heavy on Japanese work, including Int.Lab's "TOKYO 雨/RAIN" and Kentaro Osawa's "TOKYO IMITATION," part of TYO Inc.'s TOKYO STORIES AI project. From outside Japan it runs from Vincenzo Lo Re's Sicilian folk western "The Finding" to Adilkhan Yerzhanov's Kazakh production satire "Production designer from hell."

The 2025 edition was the festival's first, and the organizer ran a spring event this year as an official partner event of SusHi Tech Tokyo before this second full edition. AI Film Japan presents the festival as infrastructure as much as a competition: its stated aim is to connect creators, AI tool companies and investors rather than to screen films alone, and the sponsor awards are the visible half of that.

Tickets for all three days are on the organizer's site, and the awards ceremony on November 1 is part of the program.