A short doesn't have room to hide behind pace or a second act that fixes the first. It either works in the time it's given or it doesn't, and that discipline hasn't changed just because part of the toolkit now includes a generative model instead of only a camera. What's changed is scale. A filmmaker working alone, at night, on a laptop, can now build a world that used to require a visual effects house and a schedule measured in months. The question this festival cares about isn't whether that's allowed. It's whether the result still moves someone in eight minutes or less.

Vancouver has spent decades as a production city that mostly builds other people's visions, a backlot for someone else's story. AI Indie Shorts exists to flip that for one night: a screening built entirely around work where the imagination and the authorship are local, whether or not the pipeline includes a diffusion model, a neural renderer, or a compositing trick nobody's bothered to name yet.

The festival runs one afternoon, November 28th, from 1 to 3 PM, inside an industrial multi-studio production space, the kind of building that usually has three different crews shooting in it at once. For one night it's just one screen, one program, and a room of people who understand exactly how much work went into every shot.