Artificial intelligence shot a full-length movie in two weeks

One of the most talked-about premieres outside the main competition program took place at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The American company Higgsfield AI showed “Hell Grind” – the world’s first full-length feature film, created entirely with the help of artificial intelligence. The picture lasts 95 minutes, and the entire production cycle lasted about two weeks.

Cannes for the first time saw a movie without a set and actors

The premiere of Hell Grind became a symbolic moment for the entire film industry. The film was created without traditional filming, scenery, camera crews and actors in front of the camera. All visual scenes, characters, environments and animations were generated by neural networks.

The project was presented by the Higgsfield AI company from San Francisco together with the production studio Goldfinch. First, the audience was shown a trailer as part of a closed industry event, and then the film was shown in full at Cinema Olympia during the Cannes Film Festival.

Film crew

The director of the project was the Kazakh director Aitore Zholdaskali, and he created the script together with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, a director whose films have already participated in the program of the Cannes Festival.

The plot of “Hell Grind” is built around a group of street criminals – Rocko, Lulu, Jax and Rain. After an unsuccessful robbery, the heroes encounter an ancient artifact that opens a portal to the underworld. The story quickly turns into a large-scale fantasy journey with elements of mysticism, action and psychological drama.

To create the film, a team of 15 specialists – directors, editors and artists – generated more than 16,000 separate video clips. Just for the sake of the first episode, we had to work out hundreds of scene options to get 253 final shots.

The work used proprietary AI tools of the Higgsfield platform, including Dreamina-Seedance 2.0, Soul Cinema and Soul Cast.

Shocking budget

One of the main shocking factors was the cost of production. According to the creators, the entire project cost less than $500,000. At the same time, about 400,000 went exclusively to computing power and GPU servers.

The general director of Higgsfield, Alex Mashrabov, said that with a classical approach, such a film would cost at least 50 million dollars. In fact, artificial intelligence allowed to reduce costs by almost 99%.

The developers explain that their main goal was not just to create a technological demonstration. The team wanted to test whether the AI ​​​​could support a long story, preserve the visual integrity of the characters, and provide a complete cinematic narrative.

Hollywood continues to debate the role of artificial intelligence

The appearance of Hell Grind in Cannes once again heated up the debate about the future of the film industry. The use of neural networks in film production has been one of Hollywood’s most painful topics since the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023.

Many industry representatives fear that the development of generative AI will lead to a reduction in the number of actors, artists and technicians. Others see technology as a new tool for independent filmmakers who previously could not afford expensive production.

During the festival, actress Demi Moore also commented on the situation, saying that artificial intelligence is able to help cinema, but cannot replace the human soul, which is the basis of true art.

“Hell Grind” could be the beginning of a new era of cinema

Despite the controversy, the very fact of the appearance of a full-fledged AI film at the world’s largest film festival has already become a historic event. A few years ago, such a project seemed like an experiment in science fiction, but today neural networks are already capable of creating full-length pictures almost without the participation of a traditional film crew.

For now, the main question remains open: will this approach become the new industry standard, or will it remain a niche tool for individual studios and independent authors. But after Cannes 2026, one thing is clear — artificial intelligence has finally entered the big cinema.