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This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a provocative story claiming that a fully AI-generated movie called “Hell Grind” was being screened at the iconic Cannes Film Festival, dropping a nuclear bomb in the middle of the already-heated debate on the tech’s intrusion into the art and business of cinema.
“Four street thieves are on the road to hell, literally, in an action-adventure movie debuting at the Cannes Film Festival Thursday,” the newspaper wrote. “But what’s compelling about ‘Hell Grind’ isn’t the campy plot: It’s that every character, setting and prop in the 95-minute movie was generated by AI.”
But we couldn’t find the AI movie on the official schedule of the prestigious event, which is held every year on the French Riviera. So we reached out to the organizers of the festival, who denied that they’re showing it at all, saying instead that the film was presented in a third-party screening at a local theater in the town of Cannes.
“We can confirm that ‘Hell Grind’ was not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program,” a Cannes spokesperson told us. “As publicly reported by Screen Daily and other media outlets, the project was presented during an industry event organized by third parties in Cannes.”
The company behind the film, Higgsfield AI, doesn’t seem interested in clarifying the confusion. When the company’s founder Alex Mashrabov posted on LinkedIn this week that “we just premiered at Cannes our first 95-minute feature film” — and boasted that “for decades, Cannes has been the room where new cinema gets legitimized” — certain reactions were sharp.
“This isn’t screening at the Festival de Cannes, which is what you’re implying,” director John Washburn shot back in the replies. “The [Cinéma Olympia] is a movie theatre that happens to be in the town of Cannes but it isn’t a venue for the festival. The suggestion that paying for a screening at some random theatre in the same town and at the same time as a major festival is somehow the same thing as being selected by that festival — the actual ‘room’ where new cinema gets ‘legitimized’ — is misleading at best. Spurious bullshittery, really.”
Neither the WSJ nor Higgsfield replied to requests for comment, but we’ll update if they do.
This kind of chicanery is not an uncommon tactic for filmmakers trying to hijack some of the buzz of one of the most paid-attention-to events in cinema every year. But it’s also emblematic of the misleading hype that AI companies feed off, making grand claims and awing the public with exhibitions that aren’t quite what they seem. That a major newspaper bought the hype and reported it was showing at Cannes when it wasn’t is a testament to where things are at.
The tentacles of AI have ensnared themselves in all manner of industries, but the tech has an especially strong hold on film. AI video generators promise to upend traditional modes of filmmaking as we know it, a sentiment glibly expressed by the common AI bro refrain that “Hollywood is cooked.” No longer will you need expensive actors, cameras, or sets to make that story idea you’ve had rolling around in your head since you were a teenager a reality. You just need to know what to whisper to an AI model.
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