There was a sombre mood at the opening ceremony of this year’s Camerimage Film Festival as organizers kicked off its 34th edition in Toruń, Poland with a minute’s silence for the victims of the mass shooting in Kraków, which happened a few hours before the event began.
According to reports, at least six people are now dead, and more than a dozen injured when a gunman, who is suspected to have ties to far-right ideologies, drove into Kraków’s historic Main Market Square and opened fire. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said three bodies were also later found at the suspect’s home. It is the country’s deadliest shooting in decades.
Local politicians scheduled to speak at the Camerimage opening proceedings acknowledged the severity of the shooting, which has sent shockwaves across the country today, before opening ceremony proceedings began.
Watch on Deadline
The festival kicked off Saturday night (November 7) at Toruń’s Jordanski Culture Centre. AI was a major theme during the three-hour ceremony with festival director Marek Zydowicz bringing a humanoid robot to the stage which engaged with him as he stressed that the “hopes and threats” of AI would be a major talking point throughout the 7-day event.
The ceremony was frequently interspersed with footage of Francis Ford Coppola, Gal Gadot, Christopher Nolan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steven Spielberg and Ben Affleck who all weighed in on the subject of AI in the entertainment space.
Aronofsky, who has been a big proponent of using generative AI in filmmaking after launching his creative studio Primordial Soup last year, was honored with Camerimage’s honorary Award for Director. The Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan helmer said it was his third time at Camerimage, and he hoped to keep returning to the Polish event.
“The reason I come back is because there’s very rarely film festivals that celebrate the collaboration of everyone,” he said. “They’re very focused on not just the flashy names and that’s really incredible because it honors everyone who makes films possible for people like me.”
Karolina Gruszka, one of Poland’s most acclaimed film and theatre actresses, was honored with the Marshal of the Kujawy Pomorze Region Film Award this year. The prolific actress also starred in David Lynch’s last film Inland Empire, and she gave a nod to the late director calling him a “master investigator” of stories. Polish cinematographer and longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kamiński received an award from Deadline’s sister publication THR while Camerimage also paid tribute to Andrzej Wajda, the legendary Polish director behind titles such as The Promised Land and Ashes and Diamonds. This year marks a century since Wajda’s birth and a decade since his death, with Poland’s Senate declaring this year ‘The Year of Wajda’ in the country.
The opening film this evening at Camerimage was Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI origin story Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as key creative Ilya Sutskever. The director was joined on stage with the film’s cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed where the pair discussed the creative process of the film, which is set to be released by Neon in the U.S. on December 25 and in the UK on January 22, 2027.
“I’ve been interested and kind of curious about the personalities of what they call tech oligarchs or tech bros for a while,” Guadagnino said. “And when I got the script that Simon Rich wrote, the world he was describing was an immediate hook for me because there was a lot in that that could be told about the dynamics of power and narcissism but at the same time it was an unprecedented setup for showing how very few people control societies.”
When pressed about whether there were constraints from a legal perspective when making a film featuring real people like Altman and Sutskever, Guadagnino said: “The only constraints we gave ourselves were facts. We wanted it to be factual, and we didn’t want to dramatize anything.”
He continued: “I’m very proud because, of course, you don’t make movies for vetting it through legal, but the very interesting thing is that this movie is 100% vetted by the legal business [and] sometimes the reality is more surprising than fantasy.”
Camerimage takes place November 7-14, 2026.