AI and the Future of Storytelling Panel Rekindling the Machine: Documentary in the Age of AI
12:10 - 13:00 Wednesday 18th Mar 2026 / 50 min
In this panel, filmmakers, policy experts and critics move past the usual doom-or-utopia debate to ask harder questions: How can filmmakers navigate the narrative terrain of technological change and tell complex stories that surfaces power dynamics? Who should own the data, the tools, the infrastructure?
The conversation about AI and filmmaking often gets stuck between enthusiasm and dread. The dominant AI narrative portraits a single trajectory towards universal goals. It justifies footage becoming training data, craft automated without consent. And the tools we are offered were designed for markets, not stories. In this panel, filmmakers, policy experts and critics move past the usual doom-or-utopia debate to ask harder questions: How can filmmakers navigate the narrative terrain of technological change and tell complex stories that surfaces power dynamics? Who should own the data, the tools, the infrastructure? We examine how filmmakers can move from “users” to “architects” of human-centric storytelling. An honest discussion about a landscape shifting faster than our frameworks for understanding it.
Hosted by: Doc Society, BFI
More speakers TBA.
