MUMBAI: The 19th Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF 2026) turned the spotlight on the future of cinema with a special section titled The AI Films, showcasing how artificial intelligence is reshaping the boundaries of storytelling, imagination and cinematic form.
The curated selection brought together filmmakers from across the world who are using AI not as a replacement for creativity, but as an extension of it, enabling new ways to visualise history, mythology, personal memory and experimental narrative structures.
The films collectively highlighted a key idea running through the section: while technology is evolving rapidly, the emotional core of storytelling remains firmly human.
Among the standout titles was Legends – The Eternal Flame of Mewar, directed by Deepak Vijay, which follows a wandering bard narrating the legacy of Mewar across generations, from Bappa Rawal to Maharana Pratap, blending folklore with AI-generated visual landscapes.
Laurent Cliquet’s The Screenwriter offered a psychological chamber drama set entirely within the mind of a writer, using restricted visual framing to reflect creative pressure and internal conflict.
Xuan Li’s The Star Shepherd stood out for its tactile felt-animation style, inspired by a UNICEF visit to Malawi, exploring themes of connection, compassion and shared humanity under a common sky.
In Kishkindha: Van Katha, Aksht Verma revisits ancient mythological texts to reconstruct the political and emotional landscape of the Vanara kingdom, drawing from multiple Puranic sources to build a layered narrative.
Talya Lotan’s Stonewall, The Making of blurred the line between fiction and documentation, following the imagined production of an unmade film about a Civil War general and questioning the nature of cinematic memory itself.
Other notable entries included The Act of Killing Dreams by Karsh Jhaveri, which explores the tension between traditional filmmaking and emerging AI creativity, and Germany’s The Cinema That Never Was by Mark Wachholz, a reflective piece on lost films and unrealised scripts reconstructed through generative tools.
Rajesh Bhatia and Bharat Arora’s The Echo Monastery followed a grieving woman’s journey into the Ladakhi mountains, using silence and landscape as emotional anchors, while The Legend of Birsa Munda by Samresh Shrivastav offered an AI-assisted tribute to the tribal leader’s resistance against colonial rule.
Together, the section presented a sweeping view of how AI is entering the language of cinema, suggesting a future where technology expands storytelling possibilities while still relying on human emotion at its core.
