Runway’s second-ever AI Film Festival walks the line between movie business’ past and its future

It was just about the most L.A. night you could imagine: I was en route to a film festival being held at the historic Orpheum Theater downtown—and late after getting caught in the city’s customarily soul-crushing traffic.

So, I rolled into Runway’s AI Film Festival well after the press hour had ended, and was unsure of what I was about to see. But Runway CEO and cofounder Cristóbal Valenzuela was gracious enough to find me in the theater’s quasi-basement lounge, where seemingly only David Bowie played. There, I asked him why he’d chosen the Orpheum, an old vaudeville theater first built in 1926.

“It’s part of the history of cinema and culture, and it’s so reminiscent of the past, and I think I use the past a lot as an allegory to make sense of the future,” he told me.

And that’s what the evening was about, ultimately: the tension between films’ past and its future. An AI-generated video leader with a $1.5 billion valuation, Runway represents a future. The company’s investors include Nvidia, Google, Salesforce Ventures, Felicis, Coatue, and Lux Capital, and it has raised north of $230 million since its inception in 2018. Runway is also battling the arrival of OpenAI's text-to-video tool Sora.

Runway’s film festival is growing: The event received 300 submissions in its first year; this year there were 3,000 submissions. But not everyone in Hollywood sees the advent of AI technology as a cause for celebration. Many beleaguered creatives fear that their jobs are on the line—and that technology built by companies like Runway will take those jobs.

The company walked head-on into addressing concerns in a panel before the programming began. The panel featured Valenzuela and a number of filmmakers and artists, including producer Joel Kuwahara, known for his work on The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers.

“I was on The Simpsons in the mid-90s when it was on film–each cell of animation was hand-painted,” Kuwahara told the audience. “Back then, it took about nine months to make an episode of The Simpsons.”

You’d think technology would have shortened this process, right? Think again. With computers, tablets, advanced editing software, and more, Kuwahara said: “You know how much faster we make the shows now? It takes us about 11 months.”

It was a night about art, but also about commerce in that way, as Valenzuela and the artists on the panel worked to make sense of what the movie business may become. Valenzuela made the point that, eventually, AI-made movies may have their own name alltogether, becoming a new category of art, rather than supplanting what we know as movies.

“I feel like this is a moment in time where we’re seeing a new camera,” he told the audience.

Now, the counterargument here is that AI is not a camera, and that a camera is a camera. Which while fair, is also not entirely true. People famously panicked about the switch from film to digital, too. We still call them films, but very few are actually film.

As I watched the featured short films (the best of the 3,000 submissions), I wondered how I’d react, or if I would even like an “AI film,” whatever that means. But, ultimately, it was predominantly impressive art and, if anything, the movies that I didn’t like had incredibly normal Art Film Problems, where something is visually gorgeous and narratively obtuse.

My favorite short film of the night was called: “Where Do Grandmas Go When They Get Lost?”

A whimsical meditation from a child’s perspective, the narrator at the end says:

“So, where is my grandma? I don’t know, but I can feel that she is very close…Grandma, I hope that wherever you are, you can also feel me, and all the love I have for you.”

And I cried. And does it matter if it’s AI if it still makes you cry?

Elsewhere…My colleague Jessica Mathews scooped the departure of David Kim from Carta. A top executive at the company, Kim was involved in the company’s embattled liquidity business. Read the whole story here.

This month’s cartoon…Here’s our cartoon for May, by Ian Foley.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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