The Rome AI Festival opens the VIA 2026 season. It is a European festival built around screenings, artist talks, new creative tools, and the public conversation that surrounds them — held in a city that has been arguing about images for a very long time. The third edition takes place at the Cinema Adriano on Piazza Cavour.
Date, venue and tickets
Saturday 19 September 2026, 18:30 to 23:00, at the Cinema Adriano, Piazza Cavour 22, 00193 Rome. Tickets are sold through Eventbrite and range from free entry to €9.
What happens
- A screening programme of new short and long-form work from European filmmakers working with AI
- Artist talks covering process, craft decisions, and where the tools still 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
Who it is for
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 institutions deciding how to handle this category. And anyone who wants to watch new films and hear the arguments around them.
Why Rome
Rome is a working film city, not a museum of one: studios, schools, cinemas, and an audience that turns up. Placing a festival about generated imagery in a city this saturated with images forces the work to stand next to a very high bar. It is also straightforward to reach from across Europe, which matters for a festival that calls itself European.