About the Festival
The African AI Film Festival is the first global stage dedicated to African and African-diaspora filmmakers reimagining cinema with artificial intelligence. We exist at the meeting point of the world's oldest storytelling tradition and its newest creative tools — and we believe that's where the future of film is being written.
To put powerful new tools in the hands of artists who were never given a seat at the table — and to watch what they do with them.
We champion African and diaspora voices in the age of AI cinema, preserving and amplifying African culture and heritage while giving a global platform to creators the industry has too often overlooked.
We are not here to replace the artist with the machine. We are here to empower artists who were never given a seat at the table — and to watch what they do with them.
For a century, making a film meant a Hollywood budget, a large crew, expensive equipment, and the right connections. For African storytellers, those barriers were often insurmountable.
Generative AI has changed the equation. A filmmaker in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, or the diaspora can now bring a feature-scale vision to life from a laptop. The gatekeepers are gone. What remains is what has always mattered most: imagination, culture, and the will to tell a story.
The African AI Film Festival was born to meet this moment — to ensure that as cinema is reinvented, African creators are not left behind, but lead.
No filmmaker should be priced out of the future. Entry is free for African-based creators and students, and kept low for everyone else.
We center genuine African stories, languages, and perspectives — work rooted in real culture, not borrowed imagery.
We require transparency about the tools used, and we draw firm lines: no non-consensual likenesses, no deepfakes built to deceive, no harmful content. We aim to be a model for ethical AI filmmaking.
Beyond a competition, we are building a network — of filmmakers, mentors, technologists, and audiences — that lasts well past any single festival night.
The festival is the flagship program of the African AI Arts & Culture Institute, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation dedicated to advancing African arts, culture, and education through emerging creative technologies. Through the Institute, the festival sits within a larger mission of education, mentorship, and cultivating a new generation of African digital storytellers.
Patrick Sekyaya
Founder & Festival Director
Patrick Sekyaya is a Ugandan diaspora filmmaker and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. He trained at the Maisha Film Lab under Mira Nair, One Fine Day Films under Tom Tykwer, Talent Campus Durban, and the Berlinale Talent Campus — and was named Most Gifted Filmmaker in Uganda at the Super Talent Awards.
He wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning features Origin of Sin and The Ugandan — selected for FESPACO 2013, the largest and oldest film festival in Africa. The Ugandan won Best Child Actor at the African Movie Academy Awards and was named one of the top ten African films of 2013 by Microsoft.
In 2025 he founded ViralHQ.ai, a studio specializing in creative AI filmmaking, and in 2026 wrote and directed Mycelium, his first AI-driven film. The African AI Film Festival is his vision for a platform where African and diaspora storytellers don't just participate in the next chapter of cinema — they lead it.
We begin in 2026 as a fully online festival — global by design, open to every filmmaker with a story and a connection. But this is a starting line, not a destination. Our vision is a thriving annual institution: an in-person celebration in the years ahead, a year-round home for African AI creativity, and a launchpad that carries African stories to screens and audiences around the world.
This is the inaugural chapter. We invite you to help write it.