The two-day event showed that, at least in film, the technology is no longer a future scenario but a working reality. That made this year’s SmartFest more than a niche showcase for experimental tools. It became a useful snapshot into how fast AI is moving from curiosity to infrastructure in the creative industries.
The question was not whether the technology matters anymore. The question was what kind of role it should be allowed to play and where the industry now draws the line between automation, assistance and authorship.
The event is organized by ACG, a Hungarian agency that treats SmartFest not simply as a tech showcase but as an extension of its support for contemporary visual culture. According to ACG, the idea was always to create a platform where technology and artistic ambition meet more seriously, allowing creators to move beyond some of the technical and financial constraints that used to limit visual experimentation.
That positioning helps explain why the festival has grown beyond its local origins. Founded by Ervin Sallai, ACG’s head of copy, and developed with the agency’s professional backing, SmartFest has expanded into an international platform with entries arriving from across the world.
This year, the organizers said, 2,200 works were submitted, from countries ranging from Canada to China, a scale that suggests AI filmmaking is quickly becoming a global field rather than a specialized side branch of media production.
One of the festival’s central professional discussions, moderated by Gellért Kovács, known as “Filmszerész,” brought together a notably mixed panel: film director Ferenc Török, poet János Lackfi, creative professional Nóra Bereczki, founder of Digital Umami, ACG creative director László Nagy, and Promptmonsters founders Tamás Gács and Mátyás Kálmán, who are known as early movers in Hungarian AI-based film production.
The conversation touched on one deliberately provocative idea: could Hungarian screen legend Zoltán Latinovits one day appear as a Marvel-style superhero? The point was not really fan-casting. It was to illustrate how AI-driven production can dissolve older limits of time, physicality and even historical absence, making once-impossible visual ideas technically achievable.
That, in many ways, is the core disruption now facing the industry. AI can compress production cycles, lower barriers to experimentation and make highly ambitious visual concepts far easier to realize. What once demanded a much larger production apparatus can increasingly be tested, shaped, and even executed with far fewer traditional constraints.
The speakers agreed that this is not a passing fad. The tools are already strong enough to change workflows in durable ways. In that sense, SmartFest was less about spectacle than about adjustment: an industry beginning to understand that AI is becoming a standard instrument in the toolkit, not just a temporary novelty.
At the same time, the panel did not treat the technology as self-sufficient. A recurring theme was that speed and convenience are not the same thing as authorship. AI may radically simplify some parts of the process, but it does not replace judgment, narrative instinct or aesthetic direction. The human role remains decisive in matters of meaning, taste and final quality control.
That distinction is likely to matter well beyond film festivals. As AI tools spread across advertising, video production, entertainment and content-driven marketing, the same issue will increasingly face agencies, production companies and media businesses: not whether they can use the technology, but whether they know how to use it without flattening what makes their output distinctive.
SmartFest also gave space to younger participants. During student screenings, director Attila Hartung worked with students not only on technical possibilities, but also on the ethical questions raised by AI-assisted production. That significantly widened the event’s scope. The conversation was not limited to working professionals trying to optimize workflows. It also included a generation that will enter the industry already assuming that AI tools are part of the environment.
That matters because the next phase of adoption will likely be cultural as much as technical. For younger creators, the real challenge may not be learning how to use AI, but learning how to use it responsibly, critically and without allowing it to erode the deeper, more human disciplines of storytelling and image-making.
The list of winners underlined how broad the field has already become. The best Hungarian film award, presented by ACG, went to “Cervantes,” directed by Marcio Souosa Haz and made with Hungarian producers. Martin Haerlin’s “Grandmère,” a film centered on the power of childhood imagination, took the best mixed art film prize.
Other awards went to works spanning documentary, mockumentary, music video, advertising and smartphone filmmaking, showing how AI-assisted production is spreading across formats rather than settling into a single aesthetic lane.
Seen from a business perspective, that breadth may be one of the event’s most important signals. AI in film is no longer only about feature-style experimentation or visual gimmickry. It is touching advertising, mobile-native production, branded content, hybrid art projects and lower-cost formats where efficiency and speed matter commercially as much as artistic ambition.
That is one reason why SmartFest felt more consequential than its title might initially suggest. The event was nominally a film festival, but the issues it raised extend directly into broader questions about creative labor, production economics and competitive advantage in media industries shaped by automation.
The final takeaway from the festival was neither utopian nor apocalyptic. AI was not presented as the end of human creativity, nor as a harmless toy. Rather, it emerged as a forceful new collaborator, one capable of expanding what creators can attempt, while also making the value of human taste, selection and interpretation more visible, not less.
For Budapest, the event also showed that these debates are no longer being imported second-hand from Hollywood or Silicon Valley. They are happening here, in Hungarian creative and professional circles, with local filmmakers, writers and technologists actively testing the boundaries for themselves. If that continues, SmartFest may end up mattering not just as a festival, but as one of the places where Hungary’s AI-era creative language is starting to take shape.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of May 8, 2026.
Producing journalism that is worthy of the name is a costly business. For over 30 years, the publishers, editors and reporters of the Budapest Business Journal have striven to bring you business news that works, information that you can trust, that is factual, accurate and presented without fear or favor.Newspaper organizations across the globe have struggled to find a business model that allows them to continue to excel, without compromising their ability to perform. Most recently, some have experimented with the idea of involving their most important stakeholders, their readers.
We would like to offer that same opportunity to our readers. We would like to invite you to help us deliver the quality business journalism you require. Hit our Support the BBJ button and you can choose the how much and how often you send us your contributions.
