Tribeca to Screen AI-Generated Short Films Created by OpenAI’s Sora

Short films generated by artificial intelligence are popping up at more and more film festivals, and the largest event yet is dedicating an entire section to AI-generated movies.

The 2024 Tribeca Festival announced Friday it will host Sora Shorts, a new program featuring five original short films all made using OpenAI’s text-to-video AI model Sora. It’s not the first time AI films have made their way to a major film festival, but it is the first time movies made with Sora have.

Sora still hasn’t been released to the public and is new even for the most seasoned AI filmmakers, but OpenAI gave the cohort of five directors early access to the program — so long as they each agreed to the filmmaking terms surrounding AI as negotiated last year with the DGA, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA guilds.

Nikyatu Jusu, the director of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Nanny,” is among the five filmmakers who will screen Sora-made movies at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 15 at the Tribeca Film Center Screening Room. The other filmmakers are Bonnie Discepolo, Ellie Foumbi, Reza Sixo Safai, and Michaela Ternasky-Holland. All five will participate in a panel discussion after the screening.

Discepolo is known as an actor on “Fire Country” and “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” and has had films play Tribeca, SXSW, and Fantastic Fest. Foumbi is a Cameroonian American filmmaker who made the debut feature “Our Father, the Devil” and earned an Independent Spirit…