The Artist Centric AI Film Festival
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The Artist Centric AI Film Festival 〰️
// Attendee info //
The festival will take place in September 2026, as a full-day event. The detailed schedule will be released in early summer.
Attendees may purchase tickets for an individual awards premiere, each showcasing finalists from a single award category, or opt for an All-Access Pass.
Individual tickets include admission to one lecture, while the All-Access Pass provides entry to all festival events, including screenings and lectures.
Tickets will be available for purchase beginning in May.
Why We’re Not Just Another AI Film Fest
The future is always being charted. The festival focuses on building dialogue with leaders in traditional film and television—storytellers, directors, and creatives—because our goal is not merely to spotlight new technology, but to advance it with intention, craft, and purpose
The festival embraces a bloomer mentality: cautiously optimistic about AI’s role as a creative collaborator that can work alongside and integrate with traditional media. It celebrates innovation while thoughtfully engaging with the cultural and ethical concerns of a rapidly changing world.
Storytelling anchors Token, guiding selection, themes, and purpose. It ensures technology serves narrative, not spectacle, creating emotional resonance. By centering human experience, storytelling becomes the festival’s north star, shaping meaningful connections between AI, creators, and audiences
Token AIFF is rooted in the midwest while being International in scale. We aim to reflect this beautiful city of ours through the festival.
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SUBMIT YOUR FILM
See the FAQ, all submission criteria and whatnot here -
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Festival Details
Learn how the festival works, what the driving purpose of TAIFF is, when and where to buy tickets, what the awards categories are, see who our panelists are etc -
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Token Institute
We aim to advance the field of movie making by connecting makers with storytellers, industry experts, directors, researchers and more.
What is Token?
Token was started by three Northwestern grad students in a dense atmosphere of AI mania and discomfort. While some of our peers and university encouraged us to embrace AI technologies, we struggled to form our own feelings and boundaries around it.
We recognize that many artists can’t agree on what AI means for the future. Some see possibility: new forms of expression, lowered barriers to entry, and broader opportunities for auteur filmmakers around the world. Others see risk: an erosion of physical craft, authorship, meaning, and an environmental toll that negates progress.
What unites us isn’t consensus; rather, a collective drive for understanding and grappling with our new technological era. We realized that the tension itself was generative. Instead of arguing in circles, we began asking a different question: what happens when you give this debate a stage?
Token AI Film Fest was born from an impulse to deepen the conversation around AI ethics. We know there’s no way to know where this technology is headed. But we hope that the reality lies between these two binaries of rapid innovative progress and total devastation. Here, experimentation is encouraged, contradictions are visible, and storytelling remains the north star. Our willingness to engage with the unknown reveals as much about us as it does about the future we’re building.
