Berlinale asking ‘Have you used AI?’ of submitted films

Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle says the festival is researching the use of artificial intelligence among films submitted for selection but is not planning changes in response to the pervasive new technology.

“This year, for the first time, on our official submission forms we asked the question ‘Have you used AI in any way in the making of this?’” said Tuttle. “It is not to make rules at this stage. It’s a piece of research. We’re interested in seeing how people have used it to help do budgets or scheduling or in what other ways are they using it.”

Tuttle was speaking at an on-stage event with filmmaker Shekhar Kapur at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa on Saturday (November 22).

Tuttle said there was no likelihood of the Berlinale operating an ‘AI Hackathon’ or launching a new section for AI-generated films, both of which IFFI has started this year, nor is the festival preparing to use on-screen labelling of films that have employed AI in their production.

The use of AI for sound and dialogue enhancement in films including The Brutalist and Emilia Perez was a major talking point during awards season earlier this year. In April, after the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it had reflected on changing its submission process to make it mandatory that AI use in filmmaking be disclosed, but that it decided against.

Equally, Tuttle said that the Berlinale is not envisaging the redefinition of shorts and feature sections.

“The European Film Market is exploring a lot more, future-facing questions,” she said. “I don’t see any need right now [for the main festival] to collapse sections or to think about how shorts and features are different… We are very much in the business of trying to support a market for collective viewing and for people being able to see films together because that’s what we’re really interested in.”

“I’m really interested in [AI], but I’m also still a little bit of a sceptic, and I think you’re a dreamer”, Tuttle said of herself and Kapur.

Kapur, who is opening an AI film school in Mumbai, has frequently called AI a tool that democratises cinema by reducing cost and enabling non-specialists to become filmmakers. Tuttle expressed doubts about the increased numbers of films that will follow a reduction in the barriers to entry.

“At the Berlinale, we see 8,000 film submissions and we choose 200,” she said. “Of those 8,000, I see many, many good, very beautiful films, even films which are imperfect, but beautiful and have great ideas, but I also see a lot of very bad films. And I think there is a possibility that it’s going to become even more overwhelming for festivals, for cinemas to find work that will really connect with audiences because the [amount] incoming is going to be so big.”

Kapur, who acknowledges that AI does not have intuition, creativity or the microscopic eye movements that make human actors so watchable and expressive, said that he was far less worried than Tuttle about the impact of AI on the look and feel of a film.

“Initially, everybody’s going to say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to use AI’. [But] it’ll very soon go into an art form like digital did. [Then] we then created a new way of shooting, but we still needed to do lighting. Next, we’ll do it on a computer” said Kapur.

Citing the example of clumsy use of surround sound in that format’s early days, Kapur said: “There’s a childlike excitement about it, but after a while, you learn not to overuse technology. We’ll learn with AI how best to use it”.

For the moment, at least, Tuttle says she remained focussed on more tradition auteur concerns.

“I think our audiences at the Berlin Film Festival come to see films which are works of art from individuals or groups of individuals”, she added. “I would love to see more investment in supporting distributors to take adventurous work out to screens and make sure that audiences are aware of the films and make sure that we have the screens… In so many countries there are too few screens for auteur cinema [..] there isn’t space for the kind of work that we so value. “

• “AI is the most democratic medium,” says filmmaker and IFFI festival director Shekhar Kapur