Higgsfield's $500K AI Film 'Hell Grind' Did Not Actually Screen at Cannes

Higgsfield, a $1.3B San Francisco startup, announced its fully AI-generated feature film Hell Grind had 'premiered at Cannes.' The Wall Street Journal reported it. The founder flexed on LinkedIn about Cannes 'legitimizing new cinema.' But festival organizers told Futurism the film was not part of the official Festival de Cannes program. It screened at the Marché du Film, a separate commercial marketplace that accepts any film that pays a fee — the same venue that once showed Sharknado.

What Hell Grind Actually Is

The 95-minute action film was made in two weeks using Google's Veo 3 and other AI video tools. Total cost: $500,000 — with $400,000 going to compute. Each prompt averaged 3,000 words. Every generation produced ~15 seconds of footage, requiring multiple passes for usable shots. The first 25 minutes alone required 16,181 initial video generations yielding 253 final shots. The team embedded detailed style prefixes into every prompt to enforce lighting, camera type, physics behavior, and avoid the 'over-lit artificial look.'

Higgsfield content lead Adil Alimzhanov noted: 'You can't go into AI and say make me a 95-minute cool video.'

How the Cannes Claim Fell Apart

Director John Washburn directly called out the founder: 'This isn't screening at the Festival de Cannes. The suggestion that paying for a screening ... is misleading at best. Spurious bullshittery, really.' Higgsfield later defended by citing the Marché du Film's accredited status, which one commenter compared to claiming a 'hotel gift shop is part of the hotel ecosystem.'