TIFF 2026: Films that use AI and public debate about our cinematic and cultural future
Encode x TIFF presents Memory of Princess Mumbi: Tuesday 20th January 16:30; About a Hero: Wednesday 21st January 11:00, and The World Through the ‘Eye’ of the Robot Camera: Roundtable on AI, (Post-) Humans & Cinema: Wednesday 21st January 14:00.
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TIFF 2026: Worried about AI? Is the ominous spectre of faceless technology concealing a more familiar issue of human conflict: Who’s at the controls? Who should be? Damien Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025) and Piotr Winiewicz‘s About a Hero (2024) bring such an issue of power and human self-determination into focus by showing AI in action, pulling back the curtain and revealing the workings.
Wherever we turn just now, we’re compelled to learn – and relearn: How. How should we use and navigate a continually shapeshifting AI? There is no alternative, a familiar imperative, ironically enough, of new technology. The march of progress is brisk, so other questions like ‘Why?’ or ‘To what purpose?’ or ‘To whose purpose?’ receive short shrift.
UiT The Arctic University of Norway and TIFF have combined forces to try and redress the balance. They bring two works which explore AI in counter-intuitive ways, using the powerful language of cinema to unpack its workings. The films are the point of departure for an invitation to public debate and even consciousness raising.
The focal point will be a panel discussion in Tromsø’s public library, a meeting of filmmakers, scholars and, not least, the viewing public: The World through the ‘Eye’ of the Robot Camera: AI, (Post-?) Humans & Cinema. The event brings together the two filmmakers in dialogue with Professor of English Literature Minna Johanne Niemi, film producer and curator Sarah Schipschack, and ENCODE’s independent research associate Divya Rao.
For all the imperatives of pre-programmed technological momentum, cinema can still cut to the heart of the human experience, of AI or anything else, and set the stage for a meeting of minds – human ones, that is. We can see that clearly in the innovative work of promising young filmmakers like Damien Hauser and Piotr Winiewicz. For now, ‘the man (sic) with the movie camera’ is alive and well.
Winiewicz conducts an irreverent experiment: How can he programme AI to emulate a human cinematic icon like veteran documentary filmmaker (and AI sceptic!) Werner Herzog? Hauser, on the other hand, imagines a ‘post-digital’ dystopian future as a way of unravelling the tendrils of contemporary conditions, and charting the outer reaches of their human effects.
Technology is knowledge and knowledge is power. With this in mind, we might consider the political importance of engaging with AI critically, to use it with our eyes open and even dare to discard it as occasion demands. It’s up to us to take charge.
The issue is not so much that anonymous hoard of pitiless robots, beloved of modern science fiction, but the real, identifiable human beings who own and manage huge corporations and/or orchestrate ‘the king’s peace.’
It is they who might be, yet seldom are, questioned, resisted, or constrained. The technology isn’t theirs, yet they are quick to monopolise it. It is up to us ordinary, less privileged people to wrest some of it back, show its potential in the hands of those whose ingenuity is its real source.
Hauser and Winiewicz put AI to work for us, preserving and enhancing, not strangling the creative spark of living humanity.
The UiT research group, ENCODE (Engaging Conflicts in a Digital Era), of which I’m a member, is interested in what we can learn from these films, as case-studies in the human struggle for power and knowledge, at what promises to be a critical cultural-historical turning-point.
Come and join us! The time is ripe.
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P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.