DISRUPT:AI FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES JUDGING PANEL SHAPING THE FUTURE OF AUSTRALIAN CREATIVE TECH
DISRUPT: AI Film Festival (DAIFF), Australia’s first national GenAI film festival, today announced its inaugural judging line-up: a formidable collective of leaders spanning creativity, academia, technology, and the arts. Together, they represent the cross-industry coalition shaping Australia’s creative-tech future, ensuring we develop the skills and capability here, rather than importing them.
Judging Panel
Ant Keogh, Artist and Co-Founder, Kerfuffle
Fletcher Watson, Co-Founder, Wildfire Content
Jessie Hughes, Senior Technologist, Leonardo.Ai
Lucinda Barlow, Senior Director, Head of International Marketing, Uber
Luke Eid, Global Chief Innovation Officer, Omnicom Advertising Group
Lyn Norfor, Director of Production & Facilities
Max Schleser, Associate Professor, Film & Television, Swinburne University of Technology
Melanie Silva, Managing Director & Vice President, Google Australia & New Zealand
Paul Reardon, Chief Creative Officer, TBWA\Melbourne (Jury Chair)
Reece Goodwin, Film and TV Curator, ACMI
Anchored by TBWA\Australia, with founding partners Leonardo.Ai, Google, BMW, RMIT University, Swinburne University, AFTRS, Holding Redlich and the National AI Centre, DAIFF brings together enterprise, academia, technology, and legal expertise to build a national pipeline of creative and technical talent fluent in responsible AI storytelling, a fast-emerging growth sector in Australia’s $16 billion screen and technology economy.
The 2025 theme, Humans and Their Tools, explores the evolving relationship between human imagination and the technologies we forge to express it, with a focus on three core pillars:
Talent Discovery: Finding and nurturing the next generation of creative storytellers.
Human Storytelling: Proving that bold ideas thrive when technology is guided by human intent.
Transparency: Embedding authorship and disclosure as non-negotiables, with every entry required to list the AI tools used.
Kimberlee Wells, CEO OF TBWA\AUSTRALIA, said: “This panel is more than a judging line-up; it is a national brains trust. Each juror represents a piece of the creative-tech puzzle we must solve to stay competitive, imaginative, innovative, educated, and ethical. Together, our judges will help define what responsible, disruptive AI storytelling looks like, and how Australia can lead it.”
Paul Reardon, Chief Creative Officer And Jury Chair: “The film festival is designed to showcase the talents of human story tellers. But just as importantly, it’s an interrogation of AI itself — where it excels, where it fails; what it should and not be used for. As we work our way through all this, the right use of AI needs to be heavily scrutinised, at the same time as human creators are celebrated. To ensure this happens, our jury was assembled of key thinkers in creativity, film, art, technology, and education. Each juror brings a unique lens but shares one belief: tools don’t tell stories, people do.”
The judging panel will evaluate submissions across creative, technical, and ethical dimensions, rewarding originality, transparency, and the art of collaboration between human and machine.
Categories
Best Short Film – under 3 minutes
Best Long Film – 3 to 15 minutes
Best Student Film – under 3 minutes
Grand Prix Winner: selected from overall category winners
Prize Pool: $15,000
Submissions: Open to all Australian-based creators
Deadline: Extended to 30 October 2025 @11.59pm
Winners Announced: 26 November 2025 at ACMI, Melbourne
For more information, visit www.daiff.com.au.
Download Creative Ai as a National Infrastructure: https://www.daiff.com.au/ai-whitepaper
Media contact:
Jane Fraser | Communications | 0455541055
About DISRUPT AI Film Festival
DISRUPT AI Film Festival is Australia’s first dedicated GenAI film festival. Created by TBWA\Australia, the festival brings together filmmakers, creators, academics, technologists and industry leaders to examine how generative AI is changing screen production, storytelling, authorship and creative judgement.
About TBWA\Australia
TBWA\Australia is The Disruption® Company, part of the global TBWA\Worldwide collective, and Omnicom Oceania. As a collective we work with some of Australia's most notable brands, including; National Australia Bank, AFL, Apple, Woolworths Rewards, Australian Defence Force Recruiting, Nissan, and Patties Food Group —across creativity, strategy, experience, and innovation.
With offices in Melbourne and Sydney, we harness our trademarked Disruption® methodology to build stronger brands that own an unfair share of the future.
As part of a global network of 11,000+ minds in over 40 countries, we deliver work recognised as some of the world's most innovative and effective. We dismantle the status quo and replace it with something bold and new.
Disruption® isn't what we do. It's who we are.
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TBWA\Australia is also part of Omnicom Group (NYSE:OMC)