As Hollywood continues to wrestle with how to reckon with AI’s omnipresence, the Urbanworld Film Festival has opted for a full-on embrace.
The New York-based festival dedicated to championing BIPOC stories — which has seen the likes of Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Nina DaCosta and Cord Jefferson make their way through its doors since it was founded in 1997 — is marking its 30th anniversary this October with “UrbanworldAI,” a new initiative in partnership with the New School that will see Urbanworld screen AI-generated films and shorts and launch conversations and tech demos for AI tools.
Urbanworld is owned by founder and CEO Stacy Spikes, who is also the co-founder and CEO of MoviePass, the movie-ticket subscription company he took over in 2021.
The UrbanworldAI initiative will include two tracks: an “education” track that will pair filmmakers, students and creators with AI tools and practices to help navigate the technological phenomenon, and a “showcase” track that will feature the films within the competition itself. Those films will be judged less on the technological merits and more on Spikes’ “goosebump” method, which is identifying whether the films’ stories resonate.
The showcase will screen a to-be-determined number of AI shorts under 30 minutes and feature-length films over 50 minutes, and winners will be eligible for prizes. The festival, which runs Oct. 14-18, will also introduce two new categories, Anime and Vertical, to highlight both the longstanding animation style and a burgeoning industry of creator-led content tailored for phones.
