AI feature film opens in Cannes (but not at Cannes!)
- Adam Spencer
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
A world first as an entirely AI feature length film premieres ... 'near' ... the Cannes Film Festival.
AI feature film opens in Cannes (but not at Cannes!)
Social channels have been abuzz with news of the movie Hell Grind premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.
If you missed it, HG is a 95 minute, entirely AI produced film, using the platform Higgsfield AI.
You can watch the trailer here but, tbh, it feels like the sort of film where the trailer pretty much spells it out.
When two tribes go to war.
Now this story brings together two worlds not exactly known for their subtle understatement. The worlds of cutting edge AI and groundbreaking cinema.
So there are certainly two distinct camps as to what Hell Grind represents.
In one corner, cinephiles crying into their programmes and gnashing their choctops … Cannes – Grace Kelly in 1955 … Jack Nicholson in 1974 … Joaquin Phoenix in 2017 … and now AI slop!
On the other side, the AI evangelists lauding a breakthrough moment.
“We wanted to see if AI can actually democratise access and remove this kind of budget constraint, which limits tens of thousands of creative professionals throughout the world” — Higgsfield’s CEO Alex Mashrabov.
And the reportage reflects this.
Frank Landymore writing for futurism.com claims Hell Grind is
Dropping a nuclear bomb in the middle of the already-heated debate on the tech’s intrusion into the art and business of cinema.
While The WSJ describe the mood at Cannes as
"Overall, attendees say the vibe is shifting this year from one of existential fear to cautious acceptance." — Belle Lin WSJ
So give me the facts Spence.
What can be agreed upon seems to be this.
Hell Grind;
Cost $500,000 with 80% of that being the cost of compute.
Took 15 people 14 days.
While Higgsfield estimates a traditional film in this format could cost up to $50 million.
Is it a hell grind to make Hell Grind?
How was it actually made?
One thing it seems AI video cannot yet do is create a single long shot that holds human faces and other minutiae without things getting ‘weird’.
So Hell Grind was created via a series of individual prompts, each creating roughly 15 second clips.
They then had to be reprompted, massaged and tweaked to get the best possible version of the shot and to make all adjacent clips consistent.
According to the WSJ, the first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations. That mountain of footage was whittled down to 253 final shots.
For anyone far enough down their AI journey to appreciate the value of a good prompt, that more detail often leads to a much better result, get this;
"The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each." — Isabelle Bousquette WSJ 20 May.
And there’s still 75 minutes to go!
IN Cannes, not AT Cannes.
Despite the Wall St Journal originally reporting that Hell Grind was premiering “at Cannes” in fact it screened in the town of Cannes, not as part of the official festival program.
Does this matter?
It depends who you ask. Supporters would point out it is an accredited part of the Cannes ecosystem. Others don’t share that glowing assessment.
When it comes to the film itself, old Frankie L certainly was not a fan.
“Hell Grind,” in other words, is exactly the kind of cheesy spectacle you’d expect AI bros to make. While the visuals are impressively shiny at times, they can’t cover up the aesthetic predilections of generative AI or the people who use it. Roco’s love interest looks like every other “photorealistic” but bordering-on-anime AI-generated waifu, less a character and more an amalgamation of attractive features that an algorithm averaged together. Ditto for the generic demon antagonists. —Frank Landymore, Futurism.com
Remind me not to invite Frank to the sequel!
Everything Everywhere AI at once?
Regardless of where you stand on this: cinephile bemoaning the death of our culture and human input to the arts, marketing nerd blissing out at the power soon to exist on your phone, somewhere in between, one thing cannot be denied.
These systems have leapt forward at an incredible rate.
We’ve only just gotten over being excited comparing these versions of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Today a 95 minute AI feature is screening (in) Cannes.
In many ways video production is just the starkest exemplar of the speed of improvement in many realms of AI.
Yes they still hallucinate. Yes many industries and corporations are struggling to find that killer application. Yes a lot of people are worried about a lot of things here.
But the sheer speed of change, is mind blowing.
FURTHER READING;
"This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs" Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2026
"Cannes Film Festival Says the Wall Street Journal Is Wrong: It's Not Debuting an AI-Generated Feature Film This Week" Frank Landymore, Futurism
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