In The AI Age, Scumdance Film Festival Champions DIY Cinema

Scumdance films are, as the name might suggest, by and large pretty damn scummy. You might also call them sleazy, gory, goofy, punk, and underground; darkly comedic, socially conscious, and unabashedly goofy. 

“Make it hard for me to look away. I want a visceral reaction… A gut punch… a scare… a belly laugh,” said George Sukara, organizer of The Scumdance Film Festival.

Selected submissions are also largely low-budget and decidedly rough around the edges. Year after year, Scumdance has, on that basis, spotlighted filmmakers that struggle to find a home elsewhere - or, as they describe them, the ‘mutants, misfits & maniacs’ of the film world. 

It’s been a month since their 10th annual show; whilst the details of individual films have faded from my memory, my impression of the festival hasn’t. 

Living in SF, tech talk is hard to avoid. As someone in a creative field, I’ve begun to feel downright badgered by it. ‘You have to start leveraging AI’ they’ll tell me with a strange, wild look behind their eyes, the implication being that I’ll be rendered obsolete if I don’t. Not so at Scumdance. 

“I'm not interested in ‘content’. I want something made by a filmmaker, and AI is not a filmmaker,” said Sukara.

One such filmmaker is Carter Davis. She’s the brains behind this year’s winner in both the ‘best short’ and ‘audience favorite’ categories. 

Her film, titled Homemade Gatorade, follows a woman attempting to sell four tubs of, you guessed it, homemade Gatorade. To be precise, four tubs of Gatorade ‘getting warm in the garage' that she absolutely ‘needs to sell ASAP’. The vast majority of the protagonist’s social interaction is limited to comments made to online forums and text exchanges. In one instance, she complains:

“People in this community always talk about how they want a healthy alternative to corporate Gatorade… but then when I invest time and money to make it, everybody abandons me…..”

She’s soon proven wrong; a buyer sends her a private message. But the kind of person who wants a tub of homemade Gatorade? Super weird, obviously. But in the dystopian hellscape that is the gig economy, weird will oftentimes be outweighed by the promise of a little extra cash. 

When asked about AI, her answer was firm: her creative process only stands to lose from its inclusion. 

A 2026 paper published in the Journal of Creativity came to a similar conclusion. Human creativity relies on a desire to translate personal vulnerability, historical context, and emotional friction into form. AI is only capable of mimicking the results of that process. Ultimately, though, it lacks the intrinsic motivation that compels an artist to make sense of life through craft. 

Viewed through that lens, it becomes easier to see that the most interesting thing about art is not its aesthetic value. It’s that it’s a human being’s emotional process caught in amber. 

That process, as Carter Davis herself articulated, is one thing that gives a piece of art its character - she highlighted compromise as another. Compromise here speaks to the thing that happens when an idea, immaterial and boundless, is brought into the real world: the artist's original vision encounters friction and is necessarily altered.

“Nothing I make looks exactly how I envisioned it in my head. I think that's one of the real joys of making art; the vision in my head would be boring compared to what I actually end up with,” said Davis.

One ‘compromise’ shaping the film was Davis’s limited access to funding and equipment. From that constraint emerged a distinct, zero-budget animation style, requiring nothing of Davis but her iPhone and some elbow grease in post-production. The result is jarring, grimy, and a little ugly, but these factors work for the story, not against it. 

Where Davis’s work shows how physical and financial constraints might breed creativity, another submission by filmmaker Josh Kay demonstrates another driver of human creativity: the accumulation, collision, and subsequent interpretation of lived experience. 

A Dish Best Served Hot centers around a man whose wife only allows him to have one hot dog per year. From that sprouts an extended sequence featuring, shall we say, out-of-the-box uses of the hot dog (not what you’re thinking - get your mind out of the gutter!), a revenge plot, and a didactic feigned suicide. 

“[A Dish Best Served Hot] is kind of this amalgamation of three different anecdotes I experienced or heard about within a roughly one-year window,” Kay said. 

The first was a heartfelt conversation he and his girlfriend had had about smoking. The conversation, inserted almost verbatim into its final minutes, lent an otherwise absurd, comedic story an unexpected tenderness. The second is his girlfriend’s paranoia about hot dogs, which is the premise the film starts with. The third anecdote, palpable in the film’s particular sense of humor, came to Kay via an online community dedicated to experimental American rock band Ween.

“A disgruntled Ween fan claimed a drunk dancing man at a Ween concert was dancing too hard, spilling beer on people and screaming ‘It's my one night a year!’ which I have always found to be just an incredible thing to say,” said Kay.

Kay’s film is irrational and bizarre, but also incredibly earnest. Our protagonist’s wife might only let him have one hot dog per year, but damn it, it’s only because she loves him so dearly, and how wonderful that this man, if a little strange and bordering on pathetic, loves his wife enough to listen.

Filmmaker Jon Stout’s submission strikes a different, but no less effective tone. Winner in the best directing category, From the Office follows an office manager whose workday is interrupted by a ball of amorphous black goop that flies through his window and then eats him alive. His coworkers treat his slow demise as a terrible inconvenience. This Kafkaesque premise combined with a Lynchian visual aesthetic makes for an incredibly effective atmosphere of soul-crushing sterility.

Particularly evocative was an exchange between the protagonist and his secretary; the former pays the latter a compliment on her hairstyle, before absurdly asking if it interferes with her work. 

“Oh, not at all!” the secretary responds with a smile. 

Stout’s personal feelings diverge somewhat from the broad, anti-AI stance held by many creatives — including Davis and Kay — today. The former called AI videos a ‘bummer’ and said she ‘wants nothing to do with them’. The latter said that he ‘[does] not condone the use of generative AI in any discipline of consumable art.’ Stout isn’t so fixed in his opinion:

“I’m both intrigued and disgusted by AI,” he said.

The technology is generally seen as something that makes art too easy, or as cheating. For Stout, it’s less a question of easy or hard than a question of creative control. In his experience, AI reduces it. Sure, it can churn out imagery and video at astonishing speeds, and oftentimes the result will even be quite beautiful. But the thing that matters to Stout is that his art aligns with the vision he had in mind, and whatever AI makes, it won’t be that. 

“AI forces itself into the role of collaborator, limiting your choices to an array of ‘do you like this, or this?’ So the work becomes even more of a compromise than if you are working with physical media,” he said.

Stout’s personal frustrations with the technology cut to the core of the issue: if an AI is making your art for you, then there isn’t as much you in it. Both creators and viewers have to decide if that’s something they’re ok with. 

Of course, the world is much bigger than Stout, Davis, Kay, or any of the other filmmakers featured at Scumdance this year. The use of AI in a broad sense isn’t up to any one individual; on the whole, profit incentives will play an outsized role in how it’s ultimately integrated into creative industries. 

That vision of the future is a depressing one to contemplate, but Sukara refuses to let it get to him. Art and creativity, in his view, are only really threatened by AI if it deters people from making art, and that’s a lot less likely if we keep showing up for one another. Scumdance is Sukara’s way of doing precisely that. 

“Keep making things,” he said, “that’s the big thing. Keep making things.”