Canadian filmmaker Robert Gaudette won the Reply AI Film Festival 2026 with A Face Only A Mother Could Love, a short following Marcel, a solitary Parisian dancer born with a facial disfigurement. The award was presented on the evening of Sunday 6 September, with the wire announcement following on 7 September.
What the framing gets wrong
This is not a Venice Film Festival award. The ceremony was organised by Reply and Mastercard at the Match Point Arena, a temporary venue at the Tennis Club Venezia on the Lido, running alongside the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Proximity to the Biennale is the point of the staging, and it is also the source of the error: a corporate competition held near a festival is not a prize awarded by it.
Two grand prizes, two different films
The naming invites a second confusion. Gaudette took the overall win; the separately-named Reply AI Studios Grand Prix went to Website by British filmmaker Jiaze Li, for use of AI within the creative process. Second place went to Le Drip by Alex Naghavi and Ezra Li, third to Centenarian Kindergarten by the Chinese collective 2xLabs, and The Child of the Sea by Ibai Abad took a special mention.
The tools, named
Reply states the winning film used Grok, Nano Banana and Seedance — xAI's model, Google's image editor and ByteDance's video generator — which is an unusually specific disclosure for a festival release, and a snapshot of what an independent AI film pipeline looked like in 2026. The third edition drew more than 3,000 shorts from 76 countries, a company-stated figure, on the theme "Imaginatio Nova". The jury was chaired by Oscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores, who said he "arrived with a degree of scepticism and leave with renewed hope".
The commercial move underneath
Reply used the day to launch Labyrinth Reply, a new group company for AI-generated film and audiovisual production, built with the team that won the 2025 edition. No prize money is disclosed for any award in the release.