Italian filmmaker and AI creative director Jacopo Reale, whose thriller The Fracture won Best Direction at the Astana AI <a href="https://cinemamix360.com/2026/10/04/zurich-film-festival-selects-winners-for-2026-edition/" title="Zurich Film Festival selects winners for 2026 edition”>Film Festival 2026, says the film explores the unsettling feeling of seeing familiar reality suddenly change and slip out of control, Qazinform News Agencyreports.
Reale has worked in film editing for more than 15 years before turning to generative AI and co-founding Labyrinth Studio AI in Italy with Giacomo Cannelli and Alessandro Risuleo.
The filmmaker said The Fracture was far from his first experiment with AI cinema.
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“I’ve been a film editor for more than 15 years and then I switched to AI, trying to tell the stories that I like. This is maybe the fifth or sixth film,” Reale said.
At the heart of The Fracture is a collision between different realities and periods of time. Set partly in the 16th century, the story follows a queen whose husband returns from war haunted by memories and visions connected to another life centuries in the future. As the boundaries between the two realities begin to blur, the film raises questions about memory, identity and the way people respond when the world around them stops making sense.
For Reale, however, the central idea is less about technology or time travel than about a particular human emotion.“This film is about feeling, the feeling that something in our reality can all of a sudden change and can go out of control,” he said.
The filmmaker has previously described The Fracture as the most ambitious AI film his team had attempted. The project took more than a month to complete and combined a generative image and video pipeline with a traditional approach to editing, sound design and mixing. It was written and directed by Reale and produced byAnimatix.ai and Labyrinth Studio AI.
Reale said that while AI is changing the tools available to filmmakers, much of the fundamental creative process remains familiar. In particular, editing, narrative structure and the challenge of understanding how a story works remain rooted in traditional filmmaking.
The Italian director also welcomed the recognition he received in Astana and highlighted Kazakhstan’s growing engagement with artificial intelligence.
“It’s incredible. I’m so happy to win this award here because I think Astana and Kazakhstan understand very well what is happening with this technology. You are investing here and creating a direction,” he said.
The Fracture received the Best Direction award in the open competition of the Astana AI Film Festival 2026.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that the inaugural Astana AI Film Festival attracted filmmakers from around the world and became the world’s largest international competition for AI-generated films.
Astana AI Film FestivalCinematographyAIArtificial Intelligence
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