The Rome AI Festival is the opening event of the VIA season and the widest in scope. It is a European festival for screenings, artist talks, new creative tools, and the people shaping the next language of cinema — held in a city that has been arguing about images for a very long time.

Date and format

The festival takes place on 19 September 2026 in Rome. The programme combines three strands: a screening programme of new work, talks with the artists and technologists behind it, and demonstrations of the tools that are changing how films get made.

It is built to work for two audiences at once. Practitioners get the technical substance and the peer conversation. A general audience gets films, context, and a reason to care — without needing to know what a diffusion model is.

What you can expect to see

  • New short and long-form work from European filmmakers working with AI
  • Artist talks covering process, craft decisions, and where the tools fall short
  • Demonstrations of current creative tools, shown by people who use them in production
  • Public conversation about authorship, labour, and what audiences actually want

Why Rome

Rome is a working film city, not a museum of one. It has the studios, the schools, the cinemas, and an audience that turns up. Placing a festival about generated imagery in a city this saturated with images is a deliberate choice: it forces the work to stand next to a very high bar rather than in a vacuum.

It also matters for access. Rome is straightforward to reach from across Europe, which is the point of a festival that describes itself as European rather than Italian.

Who should attend

Directors, editors, VFX artists, and producers who want to understand what these tools change about their own pipeline. Developers and designers building for creative work. Programmers, curators, and cultural institutions deciding how to handle this category. And anyone who simply wants to watch new films and hear the arguments around them.

Attending and taking part

The Rome AI Festival is organised by VIA, which also runs the Turin Hackathon in October and Florence AI Cinema Night in November. Full programme details are released ahead of the date. Filmmakers, partners, and institutions who want to be involved should get in touch.