Camerimage opens its 34th edition with a robot and AI

The 34th ToruńCamerimage film festival opened in Toruń, Poland, on November 7 with AI as its theme and a robot on stage.

Festival director Marek Żydowicz sent the humanoid robot on stage in his place to give the opening address. The Polish-speaking android, which The Hollywood Reporter names "Edward Warchocki," spoke to the crowd before Żydowicz joined it for an extended exchange about AI in cinema. Deadline reported the robot engaged with Żydowicz as he called the hopes and threats of the technology a running subject for the week.

The theme carried the three-hour ceremony at the Jordanki Culture Center in Toruń. Video messages from Francis Ford Coppola, Gal Gadot, Christopher Nolan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steven Spielberg and Ben Affleck each weighed in on AI in entertainment, per THR. The ceremony also began with a minute's silence for the victims of a mass shooting in Kraków earlier that day, Deadline reported.

Darren Aronofsky received the festival's honorary Award for Director. The festival announced the honor in October, citing the director's long partnership with cinematographers. Aronofsky launched the AI studio Primordial Soup last year and has been a vocal proponent of generative AI in filmmaking. It was his third visit to the festival. He said from the stage: "The reason I come back is because there's very rarely film festivals that celebrate the collaboration of everyone."

The opening film was Luca Guadagnino's "Artificial," an OpenAI origin story starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever. The festival's own page lists Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Ike Barinholtz and Mark Rylance in the cast, with a screenplay by Simon Rich and cinematography by Malik Hassan Sayeed. Guadagnino and Sayeed introduced the film and took part in a Q&A afterward. Neon releases "Artificial" in US theaters on December 25, and Deadline reported a UK release on January 22, 2027.

Guadagnino, who shot the film on 35 mm and has shown no interest in using AI in his own work, said the story's real subject is the economic and political power amassed by the tech oligarchs and tech bros. Simon Rich's script, he said, offered "an unprecedented setup for showing how very few people control societies."

The festival draws a line even as it courts the subject. Żydowicz told THR that Camerimage stays open to a diversity of techniques and technologies but would not screen fully AI-generated films. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, a two-time Oscar winner, received The Hollywood Reporter's Visionary Award at the ceremony.

Camerimage runs through November 14.

Entry cards and the full program are on the festival's site.