The 2024 Tribeca Festival became the first major film festival to programmatically feature work made with OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model. The "Sora Shorts" program, announced ahead of the festival, gave five Tribeca-alumni filmmakers - Bonnie Discepolo, Ellie Foumbi, Nikyatu Jusu, Reza Sixo Safai, and Michaela Ternasky-Holland - early access to Sora and a few weeks to deliver original short films.
The five films debuted on June 15, 2024 at the Tribeca Film Center Screening Room. Beyond the OpenAI program, Tribeca also ran a separate AI shorts strand in partnership with Runway titled "Human Powered: AI Shorts Program", which curated AI-generated short films and music videos with extended Q&A sessions afterward.
The significance of Tribeca 2024 isn't the films themselves - they were necessarily compromised by a few-weeks turnaround on a brand-new model - but the institutional acceptance. A top-tier traditional festival explicitly programmed AI work as a film section rather than a sidebar curiosity. Critics noted that this is the moment AI cinema entered the mainstream festival circuit; subsequent editions of Tribeca, SXSW, and Annecy would all add AI strands or references.