Ego Blinds. Love Sees.
The Dasein AI Film Festival is San Francisco's festival for AI cinema: an independent, experimental short film festival for emerging filmmakers exploring artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the future of storytelling.
Founded in San Francisco, Dasein presents an annual festival each spring alongside bi-monthly Continuum screenings at Upcider. We showcase narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and hybrid short films from filmmakers around the world who create with AI. Every screening closes with an Audience Choice Award and time to meet, talk, and connect. Submissions are open year round on FilmFreeway.
The 2027 Theme: Ego Blinds. Love Sees.
The 2027 edition of the Festival explores the evolution of character in an age transformed by artificial intelligence. Inspired by Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein, we ask not only what it means to exist, but what it means to exist responsibly. If technology is reshaping our world, then our greatest challenge is no longer intelligence alone: it is wisdom, integrity, compassion, and the choices we make with that intelligence.
This year's Festival is also informed by Pope Leo XIV's reflections on artificial intelligence, human dignity, and the importance of ensuring that technology serves humanity rather than reducing people to mere resources or algorithms. His call for love, dignity, and ethical responsibility resonates with the questions Heidegger raised decades earlier about technology's power to shape how we understand ourselves and the world.
The Festival further draws inspiration from Ilgaz Kuren's forthcoming book, Asking the Right Questions, which argues that humanity's future depends not only on building more powerful technologies, but on cultivating better questions, moral courage, deeper understanding, and the capacity to love beyond ego.
We welcome narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, hybrid, and other cinematic works exploring consciousness, ethics, identity, compassion, integrity, interconnectedness, humanity's relationship with nature, emerging technologies, and new visions for civilization.
Films are encouraged, but not required, to interpret the annual theme directly.
The Dasein AI Film Festival brings together filmmakers, artists, philosophers, scientists, technologists, and audiences to explore one central question:
How can humanity remain deeply human while creating increasingly intelligent machines?
We believe the future will not be shaped by artificial intelligence alone, but by the character of those who create and use it.
Creative freedom, ethical responsibility, intellectual curiosity, and mutual respect form the foundation of the Festival. Through cinema, we encourage conversations that move beyond technological capability toward wisdom, dignity, love, and our shared responsibility in shaping the future.