AI Los Angeles
IFF

Raymond Chandler wrote that when the Santa Ana blows, “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” The wind still does that. It comes down out of the desert every fall, hot and dry against a coastline built for damp marine air, and for a night or two nobody in this city is quite themselves.

The films land in a room on October 18, 2026, from 6 to 8 PM at Mission Control Bar Arcade in Santa Ana: a program of shorts, a Q&A with whichever directors can make it, and time afterward to actually talk, filmmaker to filmmaker, filmmaker to audience.

AI Los Angeles IFF takes its temperament from that same weather. We are not interested in artificial intelligence as a clean, controllable tool. We want the films where something got into the process the filmmaker didn’t fully plan for: a generated image that suggested a different scene, a voice that came out wrong in a way that was better, a cut that only made sense once the wind had already turned the film into something else.

We take short films of any genre, from any country, where artificial intelligence had a real, describable hand somewhere in the making: the writing, the images, the voice, the score, the cut. One screening, one room, once a year, timed to the season when the wind actually shows up.