On October 3, one hundred filmmakers gathered in a converted warehouse at Halles Lumière in La Ciotat, France, each with a laptop, a single day ahead of them, and instructions to create something perhaps more ambitious than practical: a personal love letter to cinema, conjured entirely through artificial intelligence.
The result, now unspooling across the streaming platform SHAIKE, is "Love Letters to Cinema"—a collection of one-minute films that festival director Jeremy Angelier has called "the biggest tribute to cinema ever attempted." Whether that claim holds depends on how one measures ambition against execution, but the scale is undeniable. The hundred films began rolling out October 13, crafted during the inaugural SHAIKE Film Festival using ByteDance's Dreamina AI video generation platform.
The project represents the latest convergence of algorithmic tools and traditional storytelling, produced at a site that carries its own weight in film history. La Ciotat is home to Eden Théâtre, the world's oldest continuously operating cinema, where the Lumière brothers screened some of their earliest works. That the town now hosts filmmakers generating movies through machine learning prompts rather than cameras feels either poetic or dissonant, depending on whom you ask.
Each director worked simultaneously during the daylong production sprint, using Dreamina's Seedance 2.5 model. The platform can generate up to 30 seconds of continuous footage per scene and accepts as many as 50 multimodal references—images, text prompts, stylistic cues—though ByteDance has not detailed the computational horsepower required to run a hundred such sessions concurrently.
"On October 3rd, 2026, we will host 100 directors live, co-creating 'Love Letters to Cinema,'" Dreamina AI wrote in a LinkedIn post timed around the event. The City of La Ciotat confirmed the production in official communications posted late September and early October.
SHAIKE began releasing the completed films on its platform October 13, rolling them out in batches. Early entries included work by directors Jinju Haze, Carmen Gloria Pérez (working under the moniker MOONFRAME), Aown Raza, and Dominika Korycka, with timestamps spanning just over an hour that morning. The festival homepage notes the series is "premiering this fall, only on SHAIKE," though at least one film—titled "A Kid's Dream"—surfaced on Vimeo days earlier, its creator identifying it as part of the SHAIKE-Dreamina collaboration.
The festival itself ran October 2-3 at Eden Théâtre, mixing AI-assisted shorts with traditional filmmaking under a jury chaired by director Olivier Dahan. A recap published October 8 noted that the event drew 450 submissions from more than 40 countries. French cultural publication Télérama covered the opening, describing SHAIKE's stated mission as "débattre ensemble pour créer l'avenir de l'industrie"—debate together to create the future of the industry. Whether that future resembles the one filmmakers envisioned a decade ago remains an open question.
SHAIKE positions itself as "the world's leading AI filmmaking community and creative studio," claiming a network of 500 filmmakers across 30+ countries. Dreamina became a "SHAIKE Certified AI Tool" in September, a designation whose criteria the platform has not publicly outlined. ByteDance lists Dreamina's terms of service under its CapCut brand, confirming the corporate linkage, though the relationship between certification, sponsorship, and editorial independence remains somewhat opaque.
The festival also premiered "Super Me," an all-AI feature co-produced by SHAIKE and director Fernando Meirelles, during the October weekend. SHAIKE has started rolling out the "Love Letters" episodes on October 13, though the platform has not disclosed a complete timeline for the series.
The La Ciotat gathering joins a broader circuit of AI-focused film festivals that materialized across 2025 and 2026. The World AI Film Festival held programs in Cannes, Nice, Seoul, and Kyoto during the past year. The Artefact AI Film Festival, announced in February, featured a jury chaired by director Cédric Klapisch. AI Film Festival Monaco ran in June. Runway held its own AI Film Festival in New York in mid-2025, later touring selections to IMAX theaters.
ByteDance, meanwhile, announced a Dreamina Originals initiative in October, offering production credits and compute resources for AI-generated films. The open call runs through December, with as much as 15 million credits available for feature-length projects, according to industry coverage—though translating compute credits into traditional production budgets remains an inexact science.
The question hanging over all of this is less whether AI can generate coherent moving images—it demonstrably can—and more what happens when that capability becomes democratized at scale. A hundred filmmakers creating a hundred one-minute films in a single day was unthinkable a few years ago. What gets lost, and what gets gained, when constraints of time and budget evaporate is the experiment now underway.
