The Shadow Festival

What WAIFF and Cannes existing simultaneously in the same city tells us about where cinema is

On April 21 and 22, 2026, two things happened in Cannes simultaneously.

The main festival — the 79th Cannes Film Festival, one of cinema's oldest and most prestigious institutions — had no AI films in official competition. The selection is auteurist, director-led, organized around the principle that cinema's value resides in the sustained vision of a specific human intelligence working through a career.

The World AI Film Festival, in its second year, drew 7,000 submissions from 80 countries. Its jury was led by Agnès Jaoui, one of France's most significant filmmaker-actors, who said she joined the jury because she was "terrorised by AI and all the fantasies it represents" and decided to face the terror rather than be overcome by it. Jean-Michel Jarre, the festival's ambassador, called for an entirely new copyright model. Mathieu Kassovitz, who built his career making films about class and race and institutional violence, said he had paused production on a major feature to build AI tools he believed were superior to CGI. The best film award went to a 12-minute short by a Jordanian filmmaker.

WAIFF is announcing it will launch a distribution platform — a Netflix for AI films — in three to four months.

The same city. The same week. Two festivals organized around incompatible theories of what cinema is.

Cannes's ban on AI in competition is a position, not a policy. Festivals can set their own eligibility criteria, and the main competition has always been defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. The Palme d'Or has never been about cinema in its largest sense — it has been about a specific tradition of authored cinema, with specific aesthetic values and specific ideas about what film can do.

The ban is the festival saying: what we are for is human authorship, and we are not going to blur that line while the technology is still being sorted out. This is a defensible position. It is also a position that becomes less tenable with each year that AI filmmaking matures, because at some point — and WAIFF suggests that point is closer than the main festival wants to acknowledge — the ban will be indistinguishable from the Académie française refusing to admit vocabulary that is already in common use.

What the ban cannot do is stop the films from being made or from finding audiences. The 7,000 WAIFF submissions are not being made by people waiting for Cannes's permission.

Jaoui's presence on the WAIFF jury is the detail that deserves the most attention.

She is not a technologist. She is not an AI enthusiast. She is a filmmaker whose work — The Taste of Others, Look at Me, the films she has made as a writer-director engaging with class, invisibility, and the politics of attention — represents exactly the tradition that Cannes's main competition exists to honor. She joined the WAIFF jury because she was afraid, and she decided that being afraid and absent was worse than being afraid and present.

Her statement from the jury: "Whether we like it or not, AI exists and we might as well go and see what it is exactly, rather than being overwhelmed by our fears and rumours."

This is not an endorsement. It is a refusal of the comfort of the ban. The ban says: we don't have to engage with this yet. Jaoui says: we already have to engage with this, and the question is what kind of engagement is honest.

Elsa Zylberstein, also on the jury as an actor, said she saw "no emotion in AI" in what she watched, and that AI might work for action and VFX but not "the human dramas that I care most about." She also noted that AI-generated characters had moved past the wooden quality of last year's submissions. These are not contradictory positions — they are adjacent observations about a technology in rapid development, made by someone who is watching it develop from a vantage point she did not choose.

The Kassovitz figure is worth holding. He is the director of La Haine, the film that defined a generation of French cinema's engagement with race and class and police violence. He is pausing production on a major animated feature to build AI tools he believes are better than CGI — not to replace his creative vision, but to give it more precision and control at lower cost. A project that might have cost $50-60 million is now closer to $25 million. The savings are not being pocketed; they are being reinvested in control — in the ability to tell the system what he wants and have it do that, consistently, across a full film.

Kassovitz's framing is a filmmaker's framing, not a technologist's: the problem is not image generation, he says, but control. If I ask a character to move left, will it move left consistently? This is the auteur theory applied to AI tools — the director's vision as the organizing principle, the technology as the instrument of that vision.

Jean-Michel Jarre called for an entirely new copyright model. He said human creation is the foundation of generative AI, and that artists should be treated as business partners rather than data suppliers. This is the argument the WGA has been making in contract negotiations, translated into the language of an artist who is not a screenwriter and not subject to a guild contract.

The fact that WAIFF's ambassador is making a political argument about copyright while the festival celebrates AI filmmaking is not a contradiction. It is an accurate picture of where the technology sits: simultaneously a tool that is changing what filmmakers can do, and an extraction mechanism that has not yet been brought into a fair economic relationship with the human labor that trained it. Both things are true. A festival that celebrates the one and demands fairness for the other is more coherent than a festival that pretends the problem doesn't exist.

What the two festivals existing simultaneously tells you: cinema is not deciding between AI and not-AI. It is deciding what kind of AI, under what terms, with what creative authority, and what obligations to the humans whose work made the systems possible.

The main Cannes competition's ban is a holding position, not a resolution. WAIFF's existence — 7,000 submissions, a growing distribution platform, established filmmakers joining juries out of fear and curiosity — is the pressure that makes the holding position provisional.

Jaoui was right. Whether we like it or not, it exists. The question is what the engagement looks like. Right now the answer is: two festivals, same city, same week, organized around incompatible theories of cinema, each watching the other from across the Croisette.

That is not equilibrium. It is the shape of a transition.

Pauline covers culture for The Mirror at Offworld News.

Sources: Screen Daily, "Seven talking points from the World AI Film Festival in Cannes," April 2026. Cannes 2026 official selection, festival-cannes.com. Statements from Jaoui, Zylberstein, Kassovitz, and Jarre via Screen Daily.