Film
Directing, camera, editing and acting as the craft shifts. Film screenings, talks with the makers, clinics on rights and on the face you were born with.
WG 2026 / Programme
Programme
Warsaw Glitch is one festival with four tracks inside it: film, technology, brand and investment. Each is hosted by a different part of the festival, in order Warsaw Glitch, Glitch Academy, Pixel Zone and the International Producers Forum. Across three days you watch screenings, sit in on workshops and masterclasses, listen to panels, and stay for the galas and evening networking. The open zone is free, you only need to register. The Producers Forum is a separate industry programme, accreditation only.
Technology
Pipelines, VFX, animation and game art, virtual and hybrid sets, games in the age of agents. Live model teardowns, deepfakes and watermarks that hold.
Brand
Advertising, social, UGC and vertical dramas. How an AI spot is actually made, casting from scan to licence, digital doubles and the rights to a face.
Investment
Grants, pitching and selling straight to the viewer. Deals and rights to IP, markets, and the jobs that are only now taking shape where the old ones stood.
Agenda
Friday, Aug 28Warsaw Presidential Hotel
Doors open 09:00 daily · all four programmes run continuously after their openings.
Sunday 30 August: AI film screenings only, no talks programme.
A quarter of an hour that sets up the whole three days. Michal Owerczuk says why Warsaw Glitch exists, how to read a programme built from four parallel strands, and where to find your own place in it. This is the moment for the map: which stage is for what, what runs at the same time, what you cannot see twice, and how to move between rooms without losing the thing you came for. If this is your first time at the festival, start here.
KEYNOTE
- Why Warsaw Glitch exists
- A map of the four events
- How to use these three days
The address that opens the festival. Krzysztof Zanussi, who made The Structure of Crystal, Illumination and Camouflage and took the Golden Lion in Venice, came to cinema from physics and philosophy and has spent six decades asking one question: how is a person supposed to live. Now he puts it to the machine. This is not a forecast and not a verdict on technology, but a question about the line beyond which a tool stops being a tool and we stop being the authors of what gets made.
KEYNOTE
- The festival's opening address
- Six decades of cinema, dozens of films, a Golden Lion in Venice
Straight after the address, on the same stage and without a break: a conversation where the questions are answered by a man who taught generations of directors that a camera is an instrument for thinking. The questions come from the room, so the shape of this hour depends on who turns up. A good place for anyone who wants to test their own view of artificial intelligence against someone who looks at it from sixty years of work with the image rather than from the latest tool.
TALK
- Straight after the keynote, on the same stage
- Questions from the room
A screening of the films made in the hackathons: GenJam™ and GenJam Online. These are not pieces polished over months but things built in a few dozen hours by teams that mostly met on the spot. That is why they show what finished productions hide: where generative tools genuinely speed the work up, where they fall apart, and what people do when there is no time to smooth anything over.
- What can you actually make in a few dozen hours?
- Where do generative tools speed things up, and where do they fail?
- How does a hackathon film differ from a production made over months?
A case study from a game production where agents are not decoration in the marketing material but part of the mechanics. The speaker shows what had to be built from scratch, what could be taken off the shelf, where the model turned out unpredictable enough to need guard rails around it, and what all of it cost in team time. No slides about the future: concrete decisions from a concrete project that shipped.
KEYNOTE
- What AI already does in game production
- Will the player even notice the difference
- What it changes in a studio's daily work
- Straight after: a tool review and live scene design
The hero's journey has held screenplays together for decades, and now a model can write a hundred versions of it in minutes. This panel asks what survives of that structure once it stops being a craft you have to learn and becomes something you get with a click. Three writers and makers working with generative AI say where the model genuinely helps the writing, where it starts producing polished emptiness, and what in a screenplay still has to be done by a person.
PANEL
- Does the hero's journey survive a model that can write a hundred versions of it
- What a screenwriter still does that a prompt cannot
- Three people who write for a living and use these tools daily
Copyright grew up in a world where a person with a name stood behind every frame. Generative production breaks that assumption apart: who is the author, whose training data is it, what are you actually licensed for, and what only looks like a licence. This panel is not a reading of the statute but a tour of the places where today's practice and the law have come apart, and what to do about it before someone else does it for you.
- Two lawyers, one question: who owns what the model made
- Where Polish practice already parts ways with the EU rulebook
- What to put in a contract today so it survives the next model
The festival press conference. The organisers and creators answer journalists on the programme, on why this festival exists and on what will happen over three days. It is a place for media, but open to anyone who would rather hear questions answered directly than read a press release. A good entry point for people who want to understand how Warsaw Glitch differs from other AI events and why it sits where film, technology and the market meet.
PANEL
- Why does this festival exist and who is it for?
- What exactly happens here over three days?
- How is Warsaw Glitch different from other AI events?
A conversation about changing profession mid-career, in an industry that rewrites its own rules every year or so. Not about the need to retrain, but about what it looks like from the inside: what carries over from your track record, what you have to unlearn, how long the stretch lasts when you are no longer the old specialist and not yet the new one, and how to tell you are going the right way before the market confirms it.
- What carries over from your track record, and what has to be unlearned?
- How long does the gap between one profession and the next actually last?
- How do you know the new path works before the market says so?
A cybersecurity specialist and a lawyer working on AI regulation sit at one table, because the question of whether we can still believe what we see has no single answer. The panel joins two perspectives that usually talk separately: the technical detection of manipulation, and law that is only starting to catch up. What comes out of it is a map of what can genuinely be verified today and what is now only a matter of trust.
PANEL
- The state's cyber institute and an AI regulator at one table
- How a deepfake is made, how fast it travels and who is supposed to stop it
- What is left of a photograph as evidence
Every software company now has an AI slide and a demo that works. This talk is about choosing a supplier once the marketing has stopped telling anyone apart: what to ask at the first meeting, what to check in the contract, which warning signs are visible before you sign, and how to verify a team that promises to do the same thing faster and cheaper than everyone else.
LECTURE
- Sklep bez platformy: nowy stack
- Creator economy: społeczności i monetyzacja
- Życie poza algorytmicznym pośrednikiem
- Pytania publiczności
An introduction to GenJam, that is, to what will be happening in Academy for the next few hours: the rules, the format, what is expected and how the work is judged. It is led by the Machine Cinema people who run this format around the world, so they also say what usually goes wrong and what the winning teams win with. Required for participants, worth it for anyone who wants to see a hackathon from the inside.
KEYNOTE
- What GenJam™ is and how sessions run
- The tools available on site
- How to enter your work for the showcase
An hour on working with human likeness in AI production, legally and safely. Michał Pronobis-Proński (cAIsting.ai) takes the client's view: what brands and agencies are risking and how casting, licensing and talent payouts in one catalogue turn that risk into peace of mind. Łukasz Klimkiewicz (Taifun) shows how generative characters are made and labelled. Tomek Okulicz (AIVisioLab) looks at how AI is changing film professions. No end-of-the-industry visions: working solutions and a place for people.
- The grey zone: what brands and agencies are risking today
- Casting, licensing and royalties in a single catalogue
- How generative characters are made and labelled
- What AI is changing in film professions
A short, dense talk about authorship and ownership in work where part of the job is done by a model. Ben Chimoy asks what the sentence I made this actually means once the tool suggests, corrects and finishes. This is not about law but about agency: where your contribution ends, at what point you stop being the author and become the editor, and whether that line can be drawn honestly at all, both to yourself and to the audience.
The GenJam working sessions: teams build on site over several hours, from an idea to a finished piece. You can walk in and watch what it really looks like when five people have one afternoon and have to agree on the idea, the split of work and which tool to fire up. For an observer this is the closest view of process the festival offers, because nobody here is showing slides, they are making something.
- What does a team look like when it has one afternoon?
- Which decisions come fastest, and which block the whole job?
- What comes out of an idea in a few hours?
A conversation about money and electricity, that is, about what sits underneath every discussion of Polish AI. A data centre has to be built, powered and maintained, and compute today is mostly bought abroad. The panel asks who finances this, what decisions would have to be taken for part of that infrastructure to stand here, and what happens to the technological sovereignty of a country that rents its entire compute layer from somebody else.
PANEL
- What actually powers AI
- How to make generation happen in Poland
- Public money for production in the AI era
- The risks AI poses to public financing
A director who spent years making commercials and music videos the classical way now directs AI work with The Dor Brothers. This is that move told from the inside: what carries over from the old craft, what has to be unlearned, and what a director actually does once the camera is gone. Underneath sits the harder question, whether the thing that made the work worth watching survives a change of tools, and where exactly it gets lost when it does not.
Everyone is putting money into artificial intelligence and into data centres. That is where the big money goes.
So we are asking the other question: does investing in a human being still make sense? Or is that the past, and the future belongs to technology alone? We are not arriving with an answer.
We put it openly to Cezary Broda, chief executive of Brink Bev S.A. and the man behind Brainer, the first functional drink of its kind on the market; Ludwik Sobolewski, former president of the Warsaw Stock Exchange; Marcin Grabarczyk, director for AI deployment at NASK; and Jarosław Grzywiński, Head of Capital Markets at Business Centre Club.
A duel over eight rounds. Two speakers, one subject and a room that decides. Edi Pyrek and Maciej Zientara take on the Polish investment market from the side people usually discuss under their breath: what scares money away, where founders lose time, which habits of the industry cost the most. The format is deliberately sharp, because a sharp format shows faster which arguments have numbers under them and which have only conviction. The room is not the only judge. The duel is also scored by AI Referee, an experimental technology built for this debate by Xfaang, the festival's technology partner: it reads what is said in real time, verifies the arguments and helps judge how a live public debate is going.
DEBATE
- Two speakers, one subject, the room decides
- AI Referee by Xfaang reads the debate as it happens
A showcase of the Nordic AI scene: creators and companies from the north show what they are working on and then take questions from the room. It is a chance to see a market that built its production differently from the Polish one, with different funding, a different attitude to risk and a different pace of adopting tools. Useful for anyone thinking about co-production, about going abroad, or simply curious how the same work is done elsewhere.
MEET THE CREATORS
- Creator and specialist introductions
- A company demo from the Nordic scene
- Audience questions
A conversation about whether technology can still tell us who we are. At the table sit a science communicator, the festival host and Krzysztof Zanussi, three quite different angles on the same question: what remains of a human story once the tool can write it, illustrate it and edit it. This is not an argument about tools but about what we want from a story, and what we lose when telling one stops costing anything.
TALK
- What happens to the value of creative work when anyone can generate an image
- Law, market and imagination: three different answers
- What cannot be turned into a commodity
A showcase and premiere of work made in a studio built entirely on AI, with storytelling at its centre. After the screening the people who made it stay on stage, so you can ask directly about what the screen does not show: how long the production took, where they had to turn back, what went differently from the plan, and which stages no longer resemble classical film production at all.
MEET THE CREATORS
- PREMIERE: Between the Lines, dir. Oscar Burgos (11 min)
- PREMIERE: Freedom, dir. Marcin Rossa (10 min)
- Two different approaches, side by side: a conversation with Oscar Burgos, Marcin Rossa and Mariusz Połeć, moderated by Irmina Richardson
- Q&A: questions from the room to the directors and the studio
- JAMES DRAKE MEDIA SHOWCASE: Thomas R. Carrington, James Drake, Henry Sandford
A live case study run on a real project. A documentary director and a cinematographer sit down over one specific film and decide in public: here AI goes in, here it does not, and here it goes in on a condition. These are not opinions about technology in general but decisions taken in front of the room, with reasons and with the risk those decisions carry for a film somebody funded and gave their time to.
LIVE CASE STUDY
- The starting point: Łukasz's real project
- If we make this film for 18 months, where does AI go in?
- And where absolutely not
- Decisions live on stage, not opinions
Two practices that design for Microsoft and Google, and a researcher who teaches BIM, talk about what generative tools are doing to architecture. A building has to stand up, so this is a field where a model hallucination has a price measured in structure rather than in a revision. The panel asks where the model genuinely helps: in the concept, in the documentation, or only in the conversation with the client, and what in this profession will not be handed to a machine.
PANEL
- Two practices that build for Microsoft and Google, and a researcher who teaches BIM
- What a prompt can and cannot do in a building that has to stand up
- Where the model really helps: concept, documentation or the meeting with the client
An actor explains why he did not take the side he was expected to take. Acting is today one of the professions defending itself most loudly against generative AI, and it has hard reasons: the scan, the licence, a likeness that starts working without you. This talk is about what somebody saw who, instead of refusing, went in and checked from the inside where the line runs that is not worth crossing, and what can be built on this.
A CapCut Originals case study of agent to agent communication, shown on the work itself: four episodes, fourteen minutes on screen. Adrian Daniel Botnariu walks through how the form came together, what happens when one agent hands work to another, and at which point the automation had to be stopped for the whole thing to still hold together as a story rather than a set of good looking shots.
LIVE CASE STUDY
- An introduction to the story
- Four episodes on screen, fourteen minutes
A showcase of the French AI scene: creators and specialists present their work, one company gives a demo, and then the room asks questions. The French market is building its own language and its own institutions around generative production, so this is a chance to see a different approach to the same tools, in a country where cinema holds a different position and different funding than here.
MEET THE CREATORS
- Creator and specialist introductions
- A company demo from the French scene
- Audience questions
A writer and philosopher, a dramaturg and a man who built a working model for psychotherapy sit down over a question that sounds like a joke until you take it seriously. The panel comes down from metaphor to specifics: what madness is in language, what it is in the psyche, and what it is in a system that generates sentences without understanding them. The decalogue of metamodernist literature is the starting point here, not the subject itself.
PANEL
- The human, the psyche and the philosophy of psychiatry
- Language, narrative, fiction and authorship
- A working model: AI and psychotherapy in practice
From Warner Bros to Higgsfield: what a professional needs to know before creating, publishing and selling. Artem Petrov built a company on making authorship of AI made work provable, so he talks about the paperwork nobody wants to do but which decides whether what you generated is genuinely yours. Concretely: what to collect before you start, and what to do when somebody challenges the rights after release.
KEYNOTE
- From Warner Bros to Higgsfield: what changes when a studio has to prove authorship
- How to make generated work legally yours before you publish or sell it
- The paperwork nobody wants to do, from the founder who built a company on it
A team making a premium series half with a film crew and half with generative AI describes what that looks like in practice. Nexa began as a science fiction audiobook and is now a hybrid production, so this example shows plainly where the person works and where the machine does, and what it costs to keep one from eating the other. About ten minutes of footage on screen, then an open discussion with the room.
PANEL
- Nexa from the inside: a science-fiction audiobook turned into a premium series
- The hybrid model in practice: where the film crew works and where the machine does
- About ten minutes of footage from the production, on screen
- An open discussion with the audience: what making things in the age of AI opens up
A conversation about the jobs that are appearing where AI takes others away. Instead of forecasts and percentages: what people whose roles did not exist three years ago actually do today, what skills it takes and where to learn them. For anyone asking whether their own work survives, who would rather hear the answer from people who have already been through the change than from another report.
LIVE TEARDOWN
- Cloud API vs własny model vs on-prem vs hybryda
- Gdzie faktycznie idą twoje dane
- Kiedy własny model się opłaca
A live financing clinic: a real project with a real budget goes on stage, and the people who give or raise money for a living say plainly where it falls apart and what has to change to get it financed. The format is unsparing in a good way, because instead of a general conversation about the market you see how one application, one pitch and one budget actually get judged.
CLINIC
- A real project with budget X on stage
- Equity, public money, brand, platform, presales
- The finished financing structure at the end
- Grants, investors, publishers: where to knock
A panel about teaching in a field that changes faster than a syllabus. Lecturers and practitioners ask what to teach at all when this semester's tool will be different next term, and what remains once you subtract the specific software: craft, thinking, the ability to judge. A conversation for teachers, but also for anyone who now has to teach themselves from scratch every few months.
Seven minutes to sell an idea, in front of a room and in front of people who actually invest. Startups come up one after another, take questions and get judged on the spot. For founders it is a test, for the audience the fastest survey of what is being built today where AI meets production. It also shows something press materials never do: which ideas hold up without slides and which end at the promise.
- Seven minutes on stage, then the money in the room speaks
- Investors who write cheques, not opinions: Zientara, Drake, Grzywiński, Górski
- What gets a founder cut off mid-sentence
A conversation about engineering culture in a world where the creator is the company and tools get built in a week. About which practices from software teams carry over to working alone, where process stops making sense and turns into overhead, and how not to turn your own toolkit into a project you can no longer maintain.
TALK
- From a meetup to a product
- Developer experience for creative tools
- Audience questions
A meeting between people who hold rights and people who want to make something new out of them. No stage and no slides: producers, lawyers, creators and investors in one room to talk about concrete projects before they become contracts. The most practical hour for anyone looking for a production partner or a licence rather than another panel about the market.
- Who holds the rights you need, and what do they want in return?
- How do you open a licensing conversation before the lawyers arrive?
- Which projects are genuinely looking for a partner right now?
The official afterparty of the first day at the Warsaw Presidential Hotel. The place where the panels end and the conversations half the room came for begin. Entry for guests with the right accreditation; the rest of the evening happens a floor below and runs longer.
- Hotel Presidential, second floor
- Entry by invitation
Michał "OverJK" Owerczuk
Krzysztof Zanussi
Artur Kurasiński
Max Salamonowicz
Justin Trevor Winters
Adrien Bodson
Albert Bozesan
Mariusz Busiło
Michał Kibil
Marta Solik
Matthew Szewczyk
Minh Do
Affan Imran
Dominika Aurelia Korycka
Marta Mary Sołtysiak
Laura Tornga
Junho Her
Marcin Grabarczyk
Filip Konopczyński
Illarion Koperski
Meg Button
Michał Pronobis-Proński
Łukasz Klimkiewicz
Tomek Okulicz
Ben Chimoy
Katarzyna Starosławska
Aureliusz Górski
Kacper Wikieł
Cezary Broda
Jarosław Grzywiński
Edi Pyrek
Maciej Zientara
Billy Boman
Markus & Tanja Laukkanen
Edmond Yang
Marcus Grip
Maciej Kawecki
Oscar Burgos
Mariusz Połeć
Thomas R. Carrington
James Drake
Łukasz Kowalski
Piotr Śliskowski
Robert Gulaczyk
Jędrzej Jezierski
Kamil Przełęcki
Bartosz Trzop
Themo "themojn" Melikidze
Adrian Daniel Botnariu
Caroline Thireau
Sylvain Perret
Marc Horgues
Monsieur Moyen
Mira Marcinów
Marcin Cecko
Bartłomiej Głowacki
Artem Petrov
Robert Kamiński
Robert Kroplewski
Radosław Jarecki
Krzysztof Sołek
Piotr Zientara
Adi Sideman
Andre Danek
Piotr Senkus
Mike WolniakSpecial events & hackathons
Live formats: films, ads and game trailers judged in front of the audience.
Special events