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The Higgsfield Global Film Festival is a $1 million short film competition open to anyone. First place takes $500,000. Second place gets $200,000. Third gets $100,000. There is also a $100,000 audience choice award and 10 honorable mentions receiving $10,000 each. The jury includes Academy Award winners and the Co-Founder of Pixar, Edwin Catmull.
Submissions open August 7th and close August 31st. Films must run at least three minutes and be built inside Higgsfield's Cinema Studio. Entrants must hold an active Higgsfield subscription and can work solo or in teams of up to four.
This is one of the largest cash prize pools ever offered in the emerging field of AI filmmaking and it is open to creators anywhere in the world.
What Higgsfield Is Actually Building
Higgsfield is a generative video and image platform led by co-founders Alex Mashrabov and Yerzat Dulat. Mashrabov previously led generative AI at Snap and co-founded AI Factory, the computer vision company behind Snapchat's Cameos feature, which Snap acquired for a reported $166 million in 2020.
The platform currently claims more than 25 million users and 850 million generations. It raised an $80 million Series A extension in January, bringing the total round above $130 million and valuing the company at more than $1.3 billion.
This is not a startup experimenting with AI video. This is a production-grade platform scaling fast and using a $1 million prize pool to prove its tools can carry a real film from concept to completion.
The Detail That Makes This Different
Most competitions take your work and move on. Higgsfield is doing something that actually serves the community.
After the August 31st deadline, every submitted project's prompts and generation history will be made publicly available for the community to study. Higgsfield will also release the complete working files for three of its own AI films including Hell Grind, which premiered at Cannes' Marché du Film in May 2026, along with series titles Zephyr and Mork.
Full transparency on how professional AI films are actually built, down to every prompt, every setting, every creative decision. For any creator trying to learn this craft, that library is arguably worth more than the prize money itself.
Why This Matters for Our Community
The gaming and creator community has always been at the forefront of using new tools to tell stories that the traditional industry was not built to tell. AI filmmaking is the next frontier of that, and the window to get in early is right now.
Higgsfield's previous competition drew nearly 8,800 submissions from 139 countries. The data from that competition showed that AI is facilitating a parallel production ecosystem increasingly driven by independent filmmakers and creators working outside the traditional studio system.
That is the world we have been building toward. A world where you do not need a studio system, a massive budget, or a Hollywood connection to tell a story that reaches people. You need a vision, the right tools, and the discipline to execute.
The deadline is August 31st. Go build something!
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