Film London was proud to take part in this year’s London Short Film Festival, showcasing some of the support it lends to the capital’s creatives across short film, animation, artist filmmaking and an innovative new approach to how AI might be used to assist filmmakers today and tomorrow.

The Festival also saw the premiere of two brand new short films, Doula and Stage Of Flesh, made under the AI in Film: A New Creative Dialogue banner. Led by Fondation Liban Cinema in partnership with Film London, the British Council-funded initiative paired two UK-Lebanese filmmaking teams, tasking them to explore using AI technology at every stage of the filmmaking process, to see where the benefits and challenges might lie.

“The idea for the project came from the fact that many filmmakers – myself included – were scared,” said Fondation Liban Cinema’s Karim Nasr at the post-screening panel session. “We were scared of not being able to tell the difference between projects that were made with AI and those that weren’t. Scared that this technology would replace human artists. Instead of wallowing in this fear the idea was to test it, to empower artists and help them mitigate.”

Alongside Karim and Film London’s Jordan McGarry were [JM1] the filmmakers who worked on the project: directors and producers from Lebanon, writers and composers from the UK (in fact only one of the writers, Georgia Goggin, was available for the panel, the other, Nico Mensinga, was at home with his newborn daughter). The feedback in terms of AI’s practical uses was mixed, with Doula composer Alex Morris using it as an assistant rather any sort of compositional tool and writer Georgia finding its uses limited as a script consultant, saying that while the language it used was eerily accurate, the actual feedback was too flattering to be useful. The technology’s lack of culturally-specific knowledge also proved problematic when it came to presenting mood boards and concepts, or assisting with Lebanese dialogue, geography or history.

The full results of the experiment will be published in a report next month, and the films will be touring other festivals around the world this year.

Beyond Doula and Stage Of Flesh, LSFF saw a suite of five shorts screened as part of a special BFI NETWORK London Showcase. The films, supported by Film London under its BFI NETWORK activity, highlight some of the city’s boldest new voices, and the screening was followed by a panel session with the filmmakers, plus BFI NETWORK talent execs Aaliah Simpson and Josic Cadoret and Film London’s Head of Talent Development and Production, Jordan McGarry.

Alumni from a range of exciting FLAMIN initiatives were also well represented, with work by boundary-pushing artist-filmmakers John Smith, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume, Simon Hamlyn, Andrew Kotting, Rhea Storr, Hope Pearl Strickland and Jane and Louise Wilson all being screened.