Every generation of cinema has had its new machine — sound, colour, video, digital editing, the smartphone camera. Each arrived with the same anxious question: is this still cinema? And each time, the answer was decided not by the tool but by the people using it.
The Berlin Gate International Film Festival includes categories for AI film, new media and underground work alongside the classic forms — not because novelty is a value in itself, but because independent cinema has always lived at the edges of what is technically and institutionally possible.
Our position is simple: tools do not make films; visions do. An AI-assisted work is eligible at BGIFF when its makers declare their tools openly and when a human creative voice is unmistakably at its centre.
The gate is open to new forms. What passes through it is judged the way cinema has always been judged — by honesty, craft and the power of what it makes us see.