MyFilm48 Season One: The Birth of a New Art

May 2024 saw the first Russian generative AI film competition, MyFilm48 — an event that laid the foundation for a fundamentally new artistic discipline at the intersection of technology and cinema.

This pioneering experiment, held May 11–12, 2024 and launched with the publication of the creative brief, attracted within days 303 submissions from 14 countries — from Spain and the Netherlands to the USA and Kazakhstan. Of these, 62 participants made it through the 48-hour creative marathon, producing works that revealed the emergence of a new visual language.

The debut season was built around three creative universes: a mystical trailer in the aesthetics of an enchanted forest, music snippets for artists of Alexander Tolmatsky's label, and a music video for the band Kim&Buran. Each direction required participants not only to master neural networks technically, but to reimagine traditional genres through the lens of artificial intelligence.

The jury brought together legends of Russian culture: Ellen Sheidlin, a world-class artist; Alexander Tolmatsky, the founder of Russian hip-hop culture; director Indar Dzhendubaev (“He Is a Dragon”, “The Master and Margarita”); and Yuri Yarushnikov of the XOVP virtual production studio. It was the first jury in history to judge works created entirely by artificial intelligence.

The winner was Andrei Gladkov with “Winnie: Path of Rage” — a surreal take on a children's classic that became a manifesto for the possibilities of generative cinema. Second place went to Ilya Pronin's “GYSSY-LEBEDI”, and third place to Sofia Bakhmeteva and Pavel Irkhin for their teaser for the nonexistent film “Ozma”.

The awards ceremony held as part of the international forum The Trends 2.0 in Moscow was a historic moment — for the first time in Russia, the artistic merits of works created by neural networks were publicly recognized. Partner support from the film company Bazelevs, the studio XOVP and other industry leaders confirmed the seriousness of the project's ambitions.

The first season of MyFilm48 proved the main point: generative artificial intelligence can create not just technically flawless content, but works with their own aesthetic value and emotional impact. It laid the foundation for an evolution that, in the following seasons, led to the competition's international recognition as Russia's leading platform for the development of AI art.

The first season's trailer, made from participants' entries, can be viewed here.