Higgsfield’s 95-minute AI feature “Hell Grind” premieres at Cannes Market screenings
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra21 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen51 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It is after the cutoff of GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Hydrogen, and can be in the training data of Claude Opus 5.5 and Grok 4.7.
Key facts
- Runtime 95 min; budget $500,000, about 80% of it AI compute (Wikipedia)
- Directed by Aitore Zholdaskali, co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov; about 3,000-word prompts per shot to keep characters consistent
- Premiere 2026-05-21 in Cannes (industry screening 2026-05-16); CineD notes Cannes says it never screened in the official programme
- Full film on YouTube 2026-08-04: ~487k views by 2026-09-29; prompts and assets open-sourced
- Covered by Variety (‘I Saw Hell Grind’), WSJ and BBC News (per Higgsfield)
What happened
Higgsfield AI, a San Francisco AI-video platform, produced “Hell Grind” (four street thieves fight demon hordes after a botched heist sends one of them to an underworld) as a showcase for its tools, and presented it to buyers at Cannes in May 2026. Higgsfield marketed it as “the world’s first ever AI feature film”; earlier claimants exist (e.g. the one-person AI anime feature “DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict”, 2024), so the claim is best read as “first feature-length photoreal AI film from a video-model company”. In August it put the whole film on YouTube and open-sourced the prompts and assets as material for its $1M Higgsfield Global Film Festival (entries closed 2026-09-16; winners expected late October 2026).
Why it matters
It marks AI video moving from shorts to feature length and into film-market settings, with a published cost breakdown ($500k, mostly compute). It also started the “Higgsfield Originals” label (e.g. the 20-minute “Anerneq”, 2026-09-28) and fed the September 2026 wave of festival entries on YouTube.
Sources
6 sources from 6 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 1 primary, 4 press, 1 reaction
Primary
- Higgsfield on X: Hell Grind open-sourcedx.com, official
Press
- Wikipedia: Hell Grinden.wikipedia.org, press
- Variety: I Saw Hell Grind, AI-Generated Film That Premiered in Cannesvariety.com, press
- Screen Daily: Higgsfield unveils fully AI-generated feature ‘Hell Grind’ in Cannesscreendaily.com, press
- CineD: the AI feature Cannes says it never screenedcined.com, press
Reactions
- Full film (YouTube)youtube.com, video
Changes
- Filed
