The Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close. The closing ceremony is set to take place this Saturday, May 23, 2026, starting at 8 p.m. At the conclusion, we should know the name of the film awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or of this 79th edition. This year, 22 films were in competition, and none of them utilized artificial intelligence, unlike some other films in the official selection. For the first time, several directors have claimed to use AI. Is this a good or a bad idea? In the heart of the film market, the debate rages on, and attitudes are gradually evolving.
Dave Clark, one of the leading artistic directors in artificial intelligence, is at Cannes on the Croisette. “In general, an animated film needs 3 to 5 years of production to be completed,” he explains. He founded Promise, a new generation cinema studio. “With AI, we achieve the same artistic quality in just one year.” The images presented at Cannes are nothing like the AI films created by the general public. “With AI, a major studio like Disney can bring back all those projects that were never finalized and start collaborating with a new generation of directors capable of conceiving a high-quality AI film.”
New possibilities are emerging for independent filmmakers, as Darren Aronofsky, the director of Black Swan, concluded at the Cannes Film Festival.
