MarsAi Festival

24/06/2026

🏆 And the Grand Prize goes to… A Hopefully Not So Distant Future.
For its very first edition, the MarsAI Festival is proud to award its Grand Prize to A Hopefully Not So Distant Future by NIDO Creative (Italy) — a film that also takes home the Desirable Future Award.
In a near future, children gather around a campfire and tell the scariest story they know: a time when people worked eight hours a day, every day, just to afford to live. Sharp, funny and quietly unsettling, the film turns our present into folklore — and asks how easily today’s routines could become tomorrow’s nightmares.
The jury was unanimous. This is exactly what the festival set out to provoke: not fear of the future, but the desire to reimagine it.
Congratulations to the whole team. 👏 The Grand Prize comes with a €10,000 production grant to support their next work.

23/06/2026

16/06/2026

🎬 ANTIKA by Oluwaseyi Oso (NG)
ANTIKA returns to a question rarely posed in war cinema: what if the machines themselves refused? Twelve years after surviving a missile strike, a young woman reunites with the photojournalist who captured her escape. As a new war threatens her city, the deadliest autonomous weapons take an unexpected stand and choose not to fire. AI-rendered urban warfare meets intimate testimony, proposing a future where conscience may emerge from the machine.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 A Hopefully Not So Distant Future by Alessandro Cannarozzi, Carlo Di Piazza & Silvia Perizzolo · NIDO CREATIVE (IT)

A Hopefully Not So Distant Future inverts the classic horror story. In a distant future, a group of kids gather around a campfire — and Nicole, a slightly diabolical blonde girl, tells the scariest tale of all: people once worked eight hours a day, every day, just to afford food and survive. Through deadpan AI imagery and dry satire, the film turns our present into folklore — and asks how easily our daily routines could become the next generation’s nightmares.

🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 INVENTORY by Erwan Compin (FR)
INVENTORY follows a man who discovers a holographic interface that lets him furnish his room and choose his view from anywhere in the world. Between clumsiness and mastery, he learns to inhabit the future, one piece of furniture at a time. AI imagery makes the future feel quietly habitable — assembled, almost playfully, like flatpack utopia.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 TOMORROW, HERE by Sena Bympe (TG)
TOMORROW, HERE was conceived in a region scarred by drought. A young African man struggles to survive among dead fields and overwhelming silence, until his quiet determination begins to restore the land. The film uses AI imagery to picture climate adaptation not as miracle, but as patient labour — and offers Africa’s quiet resilience as a model of what a desirable future could look like.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 Keep Dancing by Felipe Valério (BR)
Keep Dancing follows a group of characters dancing through a scrapyard, turning rust and ruins into movement and joy. In a world that constantly changes its rhythm, one thing remains: the instinct to keep moving. AI imagery makes the scrap world bloom with colour and motion, staging dance as a kind of resistance to standing still.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 Call. by Luis Nunes (PT)
Call. starts from a simple gesture: hanging up. By hanging up on the toxic, screen-obsessed noise of the past, humanity finally answered a deeper call. Through soft AI imagery, the film proposes a future where technology serves quietly rather than distracts — and where what was always essential finally rises to the surface again.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 Beautiful Life by Aurélie Guilbeau (FR)
Beautiful Life imagines a near-future where humanoid robots have replaced humans at work. They come home exhausted, where their human owners wait for them. An absurd role reversal blends retro-futurism with dystopian satire — and uses AI imagery to ask, gently, who exactly is being served by whom.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/

16/06/2026

🎬 The Great Renaturation by Jean-Luc Ithié (FR)
The Great Renaturation imagines a turning point. On the brink of self-destruction, humanity finally chooses to live in harmony with nature rather than against it. Through expansive AI landscapes, the film stages this choice as the most desirable future of all: the moment we stop building against the world, and start building with it.
🏆 Official Selection – MarsAI Festival One minute to imagine desirable futures.

🌐 https://marsaifestival.com/