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Fear and curiosity over AI shape Cannes

Published: 06 May. 2026, 00:03

Jeong Gwa-ri

The author is a literary critic and honorary professor at Yonsei University.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival opens on Tuesday, with Korean director Park Chan-wook named president of the jury. Park’s Grand Prix win at Cannes in 2004 for “Oldboy” (2003) placed him among the world’s leading filmmakers. It also helped Korean cinema leap onto the global stage and marked a turning point in Cannes history.

Cannes Film Festival General Delegate Thierry Fremaux and Cannes Film Festival President Iris Knobloch attend a press conference to present the official selection of the 79th Cannes International Film Festival in Paris, France, April 9. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

According to the May issue of “Vogue,” the 2004 festival, led by jury president Quentin Tarantino, broke from auteurism, Cannes’ dominant cinematic ideal, and widened its horizon toward “cinema plaisir,” or cinema that offers visual pleasure. One example often cited is the nearly three-minute long-take fight scene in “Oldboy,” set in a Seoul back alley.

What newness, then, will Park show as this year’s jury president? It is probably not merely this writer’s imagination that AI immediately comes to mind. Looking at how AI is reflected in this year’s festival, one finds fear and curiosity heaving like a sailboat on a rough sea.

South-Korean singer Jisoo poses with the Rising Star Award on the roof of Majestic Hotel as part of the 9th edition of the Cannes International Series Festival (Canneseries) in Cannes, southern France, on April 24. [AFP/YONHAP]

First, in the official competition, the festival announced a “Back to Basics” policy excluding works in which generative AI holds the initiative in creation. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s general delegate, stressed that cinema is not a simple assembly of data but an art form reflecting the personal vision of a human author.

On the other hand, Cannes has made clear that using AI as a technical tool is allowed. The door is open for AI as a post-production tool in sound restoration, image cleanup and the refinement of raw footage shot by humans.

Around Cannes, meanwhile, alternative festivals known as “shadow festivals” have been held, or are being held, on the beaches and in hotels, recognizing AI as an active creative agent. They include the second World AI Film Festival (Waiff) in late April and the third AI Film Awards on May 21. With some 5,000 submissions, five times more than last year, Waiff showed explosive growth and made AI’s influence unmistakable.

The AI Film Awards has officially selected two Korean directors, Seo Jung-ho and Choi Jae-yong. They are entering a provocative competition that tests whether technology itself can function as an author, under a strict rule that every element of a film must be made 100 percent with generative AI. Separately, Jisoo of Blackpink won the Madame Figaro Rising Star Award at Canneseries, a side event.

This landscape shows that this year’s Cannes Film Festival is drawing the world’s confusion into itself as it stretches in two directions: the recovery of cinema’s humanistic character and the aesthetics of cutting-edge technology. Two discussion programs during the festival are expected to examine the direction of film art in the AI era.

One is the Cannes-linked forum “Art in the Age of AI,” which will explore how AI, mixed reality and virtual reality can coexist with traditional film grammar. The other is the Marché du Film’s “AI Summit to empower talent,” which will discuss ethical AI use, data sovereignty and ways to use AI not as a substitute for creation but as a tool to maximize creativity.

This photograph taken on April 11 shows Khushwant Singh, author of Maharaja in Denims and co-founder of AI-driven production house Intelliflicks Studios, which is set to release an artificial intelligence generated adaptation of the book envisioned as the world's first full-length AI realism film, working at his residence in Chandigarh. Many filmmakers fear the existential threat of artificial intelligence, but in India the race is on to produce the first hit Bollywood feature generated by the technology. [AFP/YONHAP]

These reports also recall cinema’s close attachment to technology. The technological form that would become the matrix of AI first bloomed in cinema: computer graphics, or CG, which appeared in the 1980s and 1990s and overturned filmmaking. At the time, the technology was called morphing. Its power lay in creating scenes that could never be filmed with a camera.

A representative example appears in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), when the liquid metal robot T-1000 melts and transforms into people, floors, iron bars and other forms. The shock of watching the robot pass through police-station bars because of its “mimetic polyalloy” property, while a pistol is caught and left behind, remains vivid even now.

The age of AI may be described as the stage in which virtual reality created by CG developed into augmented reality and has now begun to become “real reality.” In the era of virtual reality, people were enthusiastic and immersed. Now, as we witness AI that appears all too human while surpassing humans, we are entering a valley of discomfort and fear. The next question is whether civilization will climb the mountain again or sink endlessly below the valley. For now, this has fallen to humanity as its task. It is not a vacation assignment. What should be done?

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.