The AI Movie Awards Open in London November 7 With a Matrix Oscar Winner on the Jury

An AI film festival can book any jury it likes. The jury the AI Movie Awards booked for their second edition — Saturday and Sunday, November 7–8, at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London — is a deliberate construction, and worth reading as one.

The five names

• David Barron — producer of the Harry Potter films. The franchise era's inside man.
• Tommy Harper — producer across Mission: Impossible, Top Gun and Star Wars. Blockbuster logistics at the highest level.
• John Gaeta — Academy Award winner for The Matrix. The man whose name is attached to bullet time is now judging films made with models.
• Stuart Cripps — VFX and AI supervisor, Transformers: Age of Extinction. The one juror who works both sides of the fence professionally.
• Fab Morvan — Grammy-nominated, of Milli Vanilli. A juror whose career is the industry's most famous argument about performance, authenticity and credit — at an AI festival, that booking isn't an accident, whatever else it's.

Festival director Federico Luglio describes the point plainly: bringing the AI community "into direct conversation" with the industries. James Drake Media, a festival partner, puts it more bluntly through Thomas Righini Carrington: "The two are merging." Believe the second quote and the jury is a merger committee. Believe the first and it's a conversation. Either way, the room is the story.

What they're judging

Thirty finalists, drawn from 57 countries (our preview piece, sibling draft 45, has the finalist field in full). The categories run Best Feature, Documentary, Short and Animation, plus new ground this year: image and motion art, advertising, music, and vertical work — the phone-shaped formats the first edition didn't have a home for. The panel programme includes Maureen Kerr.

For scale: the first edition, held in Magaluf, Mallorca in spring 2026, drew 300+ submissions from 37 countries and 200 attendees from 20+ nations. A year on, the finalist pool alone spans 57 countries, and the venue is a learned institution on the Embankment. Whatever you think of the films, the trajectory is legible.

What this desk is watching

Not the trophies — the credits. When a Gaeta or a Barron puts a name on an AI-made winner, the interesting document is the one that says what the humans in the loop actually did: who prompted, who cut, who composited, who scored. This festival publishes its jury. The test of its second edition is whether it publishes its process with the same confidence. Winners land across the weekend; we'll file them, with the credits as given.