Cristóbal Valenzuela


Opening remarks for Runway's 2026 AI Film Festival in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo.

June 2026

In the spring of 2022, which measured in AI timelines is roughly 140 years ago, we had the slightly unreasonable idea of putting together a festival.

The idea was simple. We wanted to showcase what a handful of experimental artists were beginning to make with AI.

And remember, this was 2022. Again, 140 years ago. To most people, this made almost no sense.

You couldn’t really generate anything consistent. AI video was not only unavailable, it was understood to be very far away. Maybe decades away. Or, in AI timelines, thousands of years away.

It just didn’t make sense.

In retrospect, I think that was part of the point.

We called it the AI Film Festival, and seventy people showed up.

Which sounds pretty good until you remember that our entire company was about 30 people at the time, and many of them were in the room.

So it kind of made sense.

But not really.

Four years have passed since that spring. And looking around this room, it’s clear that this small, strange idea seems to have made sense to a lot more people now.

Just look around.

Thousands of you have come here from all over the world to experience the edge of storytelling and technology.

And I think that makes all the sense in the world.

Let me explain why.

Stories are not just entertainment. They are one of the basic ways human beings survive reality.

Long before we had studios, cameras, screens, distribution platforms, or awards shows, we had stories. We told them in songs and in gestures. In memories passed from one person to another because forgetting them would have been dangerous.

Stories helped us form language, culture, religion, politics, families, nations, and civilization itself.

In a world now filled with language models, it is worth remembering that story comes before language.

Stories are how we make sense of the world. They are how we turn experience into meaning.

A society is, in many ways, the collection of stories it repeats.

And right now, we are living through an era of profound change. Economic change. Political change. Social, cultural, and probably the biggest technological change we have ever been through.

The world is moving faster than any one person can grasp alone.

So we need more stories.

More voices. More perspectives. More people with the ability to take something private, something difficult to describe, and make it visible to someone else.

The theme of this festival from the beginning has been that technology is changing stories.

But more importantly, technology is changing who gets to tell them.

To illustrate this point, let me tell you a story.

Last week at the Tribeca Festival, I was invited to a 60-minute panel on the future of AI and film.

The last 15 minutes were a Q&A with the audience.

A few questions in, a man stood up and said he didn’t really have a question.

And if you have ever been on a panel, you know that sentence usually goes one of two ways. Most of the time, you start preparing emotionally for the wrong one.

But then he began telling his own story.

Twenty-five years ago, he wrote a screenplay.

It got the attention of a few production companies and Sundance. For a moment, it looked like it might actually become a film.

And then life happened.

He had two kids. He had a full-time job. The screenplay was a side project, and eventually he had to put it aside for his family.

But he never really let it go.

For years, he kept thinking about this film. He talked about it with his family and friends. He carried certain scenes around in his mind.

But film is expensive. Film is demanding. Film requires equipment, money, time, luck, and often permission.

You cannot simply decide to make a film in the same way you decide to write a page.

So the story stayed where so many stories do.

In his head.

Then, two weeks ago, 25 years after he first wrote the screenplay, he discovered Runway.

And he used it to turn that script into a trailer and a sizzle.

For the first time, he could see it.

He brought the video to Tribeca and showed it to a few people from the industry. He told me the response had been overwhelmingly positive, especially to the two scenes he had imagined for years.

It was a beautiful moment because suddenly all the things we had been discussing on the panel became real through him.

Through Steven, who is here with us tonight.

And that, to me, is the point.

This is not a festival about machines having ideas.

It is a festival about people finally being able to show us ideas they have been carrying for years.

It is a festival of stories that technology is helping people get out of their heads.

Stories that might otherwise have stayed invisible.

Stories that were too expensive, too difficult, too strange, too personal, or too impossible to make before now.

Stories like Steven’s.

Every film you are about to see tonight began with someone who could not stop thinking about something.

Tonight, I want you to watch the tools. Watch the images. Watch the craft. Watch the new forms that are beginning to appear.

But also watch for the human pressure underneath all of it.

Most of the technologies used to make the films you are about to see did not exist just a few months ago.

Or, in AI timelines, about 20 years ago.

We are here because stories are how we make sense of the world.

And we need to make sense of the world right now.

Maybe more than ever.

So tonight, I invite you to watch these films not only as demonstrations of new technology, but as evidence of something much more interesting:

People are finding new ways to show us what they have been carrying.

So please, sit back. Let yourself connect with what you see on screen. Try to forget, at least for a little while, how it was made.

Enjoy the films.

Enjoy the edge of storytelling.

And enjoy the strange, necessary, human act of making sense together.