Higgsfield is putting $1,000,000 behind AI short films, and an Oscar-winning jury decides who gets it
Fourteen winners split a $1M pool, with $500,000 for first place. Ed Catmull is on the jury. Films are made entirely inside Higgsfield and submissions close 3 September at 11:59 PM PT.
Higgsfield has put $1,000,000 in cash behind a short film contest, and the jury reviewing entries includes Ed Catmull, the five-time Oscar winner who ran Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, alongside Phedon Papamichael, the twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer behind Ford v Ferrari. This is the largest single-platform AI film prize ever offered, and the winners list is fourteen names long.
The split rewards more than the top film. First place takes $500,000, second $200,000, third $100,000, an Audience Choice award pays $100,000, and ten honourable mentions receive $10,000 each. Ten of the fourteen prizes sit in that last band, which changes the maths of entering: the realistic target for most filmmakers is the top fourteen, and that is a very different bet from needing to beat everyone.
The timeline moved
Higgsfield announced the festival with an August 31 deadline, then pushed the schedule back. The competition opened 10 August and submissions now close 3 September 2026 at 11:59 PM PT. The shortlist lands 24 September, the jury reviews from 25 September to 1 October, and winners are announced in the first week of October. If you saw the original dates, you have three extra days.
How it works
Films are a minimum of three minutes, with three to five recommended, in any genre and any language with English subtitles or voice-over. Entry is open worldwide to anyone 18 or over with an active Higgsfield subscription, solo or in teams of up to four, and entries are unlimited as long as each is a standalone film.
The defining rule: everything is generated from scratch inside Higgsfield's Cinema Studio during the competition window. You can cut and mix in external editing software, but you cannot generate new content outside the platform, and inputs cannot include a real person's face or voice, including your own. Your generation history inside the project is your proof of work. The finished film carries Higgsfield's watermark and is posted publicly on Instagram, YouTube, X or Reddit as part of submission.
Alongside the festival, Higgsfield open-sourced three of its own films, Hell Grind, Zephyr and Mork, with every prompt public, as reference for what the platform's ceiling looks like.
Read before you enter
Two terms deserve a clear look. First, once the deadline passes, every submitted project becomes open for the whole community to study, prompts and generation history included. Entering means publishing your process, win or lose. Second, every eligible entry grants Higgsfield a perpetual licence to use the film in its marketing. You are trading workflow privacy and marketing rights for a shot at a fourteen-way $1M pool with a jury this senior. For plenty of filmmakers that is a fair trade, but it is a trade.
Full rules and the project workspace are on the official festival page.
Source: Higgsfield's announcement, timeline update, official festival page.