The Urbanworld Film Festival, the Oscar qualifying festival that turns 30 this October, is marking the milestone by wading into one of Hollywood’s most contentious debates. Rather than sidestep the question of artificial intelligence in filmmaking, the New York-based festival is leaning in, announcing a new initiative called UrbanworldAI that will screen AI-generated films, host technology demonstrations, and pair creators with AI tools as part of its official programming.
The festival, founded in 1997 and dedicated to championing BIPOC storytelling, has served as an early stage for filmmakers including Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Nia DaCosta and Cord Jefferson. Its owner and CEO, Stacy Spikes, who also co-founded MoviePass, says the move is less about endorsing any particular technology and more about making sure the communities Urbanworld serves are not left out of a conversation that is already reshaping the industry.
“We’ve always felt it was our responsibility for our filmmaker communities to be a place where we could bring the technology and the people using it and creating it and put them together to make sure that you’re as up to speed as anyone else,” Spikes said. “Making films is a very expensive hobby, and as AI is bringing costs down, it’s going to open up more people who can make things at a level they couldn’t make before.”
The UrbanworldAI initiative will run on two tracks during the festival, which takes place October 14 through 18 in partnership with the New School. An education track will connect filmmakers, students and creators with AI tools and workflows. A showcase track will fold AI-generated shorts under 30 minutes and feature-length films over 50 minutes directly into the festival’s competition. Entries will be judged not on their technical sophistication but on what Spikes calls his “goosebump” method, asking simply whether a film’s story lands emotionally. Winners will be eligible for prizes. The festival is also introducing two new categories this year, Anime and Vertical, reflecting both a longstanding animation tradition and the growing market for creator-driven content built for phone screens.
The decision puts Urbanworld in rare company among major film festivals. Cannes has banned AI-generated films from its official selection, routing entries like “Hell Grind” into its adjacent marketplace instead. Tribeca drew attention last week when it screened the 75-minute AI-generated film “Dreams of Violets,” making it an outlier. Spikes frames Urbanworld’s approach as the more historically grounded response, drawing parallels to earlier moments when the industry resisted digital filmmaking, or the shift from VHS to DVD to streaming.
“Technology is going to move forward,” he said. “I think it’s just about being a platform that is not exclusionary. The marketplace will figure itself out. If it’s not popular and people don’t like it and the formats are bad and it never looks right, it’s not gonna work out, and you won’t see us showing a bunch of it. But I think you should give things a chance to be seen.”
Not everyone in Urbanworld’s orbit is likely to share that view. Many of the festival’s most prominent alumni have been cautious or critical of AI’s role in traditional filmmaking. Coogler and DaCosta have each spoken publicly about the technology’s potential threat to the creative community, and neither they nor DuVernay commented on the announcement, with representatives citing production commitments. The broader creative community, including actors, writers and directors, remains largely opposed to AI’s incorporation into studio filmmaking, even as studios themselves have begun licensing their characters and intellectual property to AI companies and some filmmakers have put their names and finances behind those same companies.
Spikes believes that reality makes engagement more urgent, not less. “Why wouldn’t you want filmmakers to be aware of tools?” he said. “It would be irresponsible to say to certain communities, ‘Don’t look over here.’ If you look at what’s coming out of India and coming out of Asia, the danger is our kids and our students and our filmmakers don’t create or don’t learn to use tools, and they get left behind.”