“Poland is the world champion of AI video” was the headline flesz.news ran on 31 August 2026, the day after Warsaw Glitch 2026 ended. Piotr Leleń’s piece, based on the festival’s press material, tells the story of the Polish Eagles, the national team that won the first Machine Cinema GenJam Director’s Cup: four rounds, four wins, France 3:0, Nigeria 2:1, the United States 2:1 and Indonesia 3:0 in the final, out of a field that started with more than a thousand creators from over sixty countries and produced 510 films.
The team’s captain, Michał “OverJK” Owerczuk, was named MVP of the tournament, and his film URSULA came first in the final ranking.
“I entered Poland into this tournament because, after several years of hackathons and watching the international scene, I knew we had people who could compete with the best. I assumed a Top 3 was within our reach, but only when we beat the USA in the semifinal did we truly believe we could win the first AI video world championship. […] Technology was important, but in the end the idea, experience and the ability to tell a story won.”
A championship, and an experiment in a new kind of cinema
Flesz frames the cup as both a sporting contest and an experiment in how films can be made. A few years ago, the article notes, a film with whole worlds, historical locations, dozens of characters and complex visual effects needed large crews, months of work and a serious budget. Generative tools remove part of those barriers, but they do not remove the author. When every national team has access to similar technology, knowing the tool stops being an advantage, and what counts is far older than AI: the idea, dramaturgy, taste, pace, editing, image and emotion.
For Poland that meant something specific. The Warsaw mermaid, the Warsaw Uprising, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Jan Kochanowski, Bolesław Leśmian and a Polish housing estate could, in a few hours, become part of an international competition watched and judged by filmmakers from other parts of the world. Owerczuk sees it as a turning point: “Generative cinema is ceasing to be an experiment limited to individual artists,” he said in a statement published by Interia during the tournament. “A global community, new models of collaboration and new formats of competition are forming around it. Poland has found itself at the centre of this process.”
URSULA, the film that gave Poland first place
Flesz gives URSULA its own section. The film used generative AI only as a means to tell a story deeply tied to Polish literature: its starting point was Jan Kochanowski’s Laments and the death of his daughter Urszula, and it also reached for Bolesław Leśmian’s poem Urszula Kochanowska, in which the poet returns, centuries later, to the story of Kochanowski’s child and imagines her fate after death.
The final lap in Warsaw
The win had its official finale at Warsaw Glitch 2026, the festival of film and AI at Kinoteka in the Palace of Culture and Science, where the champion team was presented to the audience and its members received awards for taking part in the first Director’s Cup. Machine Cinema’s Minh Do, Meg Button and Affan Imran came to Warsaw, the Polish Eagles’ films were screened, and the team could tell the whole story together for the first time since the online contest ended, from the first match against France to the win over Indonesia.
Flesz ends on the line that became the shortest summary of the whole campaign: technology made this championship possible, but the Polish victory showed something much more traditional, that in the end you still need a story worth telling.
Original source: flesz.news (in Polish).
Source: flesz.news (opens in a new tab). Facts checked against the source on .
