The AI Movie Awards Open in London on Saturday With 30 Finalists From 57 Countries. Here Are the Five to Watch First.

The facts of the weekend first, because they're short and solid. The AI Movie Awards — AIMA for short — holds its second edition this Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8, at the Institution of Engineering and Technology in Savoy Place, London. Thirty final films will screen there across the two days. The winners are announced at the ceremony on Sunday, November 8.

The films were picked from more than 500 submissions sent in from 57 countries, according to the organisers' announcement of the finalists. The categories named in that announcement include Best Short, Best Animation, Best Thriller, Best Sci-Fi, Best Ad and Best Music Video, and the running times run from under a minute to over half an hour — the announcement notes the line-up also takes in the advertising and music categories the awards added this year as it widened beyond film alone.

The jury doing the final judging: David Barron, a producer on the Harry Potter films; Tommy Harper, a producer whose credits include Mission: Impossible, Top Gun and Star Wars; John Gaeta, who won an Academy Award for the visual effects on The Matrix films; Stuart Cripps, a visual effects and AI supervisor whose work includes Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Day After Tomorrow; and Fab Morvan, the Grammy-nominated Milli Vanilli artist. Tech strategist and Forbes journalist Maureen Kerr also joins the panel programme.

For scale: AIMA's first edition ran in Magaluf, Mallorca, earlier this year and drew, by the organisers' count, more than 300 submissions from 37 countries and 200 attendees from more than 20 nations. London, run with James Drake Media, is the bigger room — more entries, more countries, and a jury with studio credits. What it isn't yet is an old institution. This is year two, and the field is still small enough that one strong film can turn up everywhere at once. Which brings us to the list.

The five to watch, ranked by what's already on the record

A rule for this list, stated plainly: the ranking below is by past results only — prizes and finals these films or makers have already reached at other festivals this year, as reported by the sources under this piece. It isn't a guess at Sunday's winners, and it says nothing about which film is "best." Nobody at this desk has seen all thirty.

1. A Face Only a Mother Could Love — Robert Gaudette. The form horse, and it isn't close. The same short arrives in London having already taken the film Grand Prix at Runway's AI Festival and first place at the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice this year (Runway's own site lists the film as its Grand Prix winner, and Reply's press release names it first place in Venice — both re-checked by this desk on November 6). It's the only finalist in London that has already won two rooms. If it wins a third on Sunday, that's the story of the weekend. Watch for our follow-up either way.

2. The category stretchers. The finalists running past half an hour are worth your attention for a plain reason: most films made this way are short, because keeping people, places and voices steady gets harder with every added minute. A finalist that holds together at thirty-plus minutes is showing you the craft problem being solved in public. The announcement doesn't map titles to running times, so this desk won't guess which ones — but when the running order is published, those are the screenings to sit in.

3. The advertising and music entries. New categories this year, and the ones most likely to change what these awards are. A short film can hide in a festival. An ad has to land in thirty seconds, in public, next to work made the ordinary way. Whichever ad or music film wins on Sunday will be the one clients and agencies ask about on Monday.

4. Henry — Emanuele Riccetti. First name on the organisers' finalist list, which earns it a watch slot and nothing more — this desk doesn't read running order as favour. It's here as the list's honest unknown: of the thirty, it's the one this desk knows least about going in, and AIMA put it at the top of its own page.

5. The home crowd's long tail. Twenty-eight more films fill out the thirty: Unmerciful (Sam Hearn), They Came When We Left (Justinas Vosylius), The Finding (Vincenzo Lo Re), A Single Thing (Jaime Max), Shifters pt 1 (Eike Swoboda), By Your Side (Avaren), IRON (Giulio Fulchignoni), Nix (Anton Ariki), Happy Harry (Michèle Petersen and Michel Eggers), The Pastor Says (Mikhail Wolkonsky), When You Run From Your Mum (Edmond Yang), Cempasuchil (Melanie Nox), The Gift (Junho Her), Elara & The Ash King (Marcus Grip), REDDOOR (Tengiz Tadumazen), Green Apples_My Grandma (Liu Cici and Xiangying Wang), Maria, Maria (Alex Marco and Tomas Bucetto), The One Who Watches (Leighanne Fernandes), The Detective (Jae Solina), The Gosari Monsoon (Eungyu Lee), The Trials (Hal Watmough), Candy (Jiaze Li), Most Ideas Die in Notebooks (Julien Paolini), Pizza Heist (Tamara Llorens), Glen Avon (Emanuele Di Bacco), Oasis (Glen Jacques Park), Performance Improvement Plan (Jacky Wong) and Twilight Zone (Adam Valu). Every one of those names is exactly as the organisers printed it. The full thirty is the real list; the five slots above are just where to point your eyes first.

What happens after Sunday

The next date on this circuit is a fortnight later and an ocean away: the first African AI Film Festival runs live in Hollywood on Saturday, November 21, with a second screening in Kampala, Uganda, on Saturday, December 12 — dates from the festival's own site. And on Monday, this desk files the AIMA results: who won, in which categories, and whether the form horse did it again. If a film you care about is in the thirty and we have its story wrong, the finalist announcement under this piece is the record we worked from.