Rome's FUTURA26 grew from five panels to 18, and the talk turned to voices, faces and tax-credit forms

Antonio Saccone, president of Cinecittà, Rome's film studios, called artificial intelligence a "spada di Damocle" over every trade, not only cinema, as FUTURA26 opened in Rome on October 28, 2026. The two-day meeting on film, innovation and emerging technologies closed on October 29 with a count of more than 300 panel registrations.

From five panels to eighteen

FUTURA26 was organised by CrewReel Services, with the scientific curation of Dedalus, a new-media research centre, and the support of Cinecittà. It ran in two venues: the Palazzo dello Spettacolo, given over to market, rights and positioning, and the ANICA auditorium, the hall of the Italian film and audiovisual industry association, which hosted sessions on technology, training and tools.

Silvia Paonessa, CrewReel's founder and chief executive, said the team began with five panels and ended with eighteen, because a picture of the change needed every point of view at one table. According to the closing communiqué, which the exhibitors' association ANEC published on October 29, more than 250 professionals from over 200 companies, institutions and organisations signed up for the panels.

Those are registrations, not a headcount.

The guest list explains why the number grew. It took in the Ministry of Culture, the Chamber of Deputies, the European Parliament, Google Italy, YouTube, Netflix, Sony Pictures, RaiPlay, Mediaset Infinity, the Motion Picture Association, the actors' union UNITA, the voice actors' association ANAD, Writers Guild Italia and Adobe.

Saccone's fear, and a studio's answer

Saccone began with an emotion. The question, he said, is how the sector reacts to its fear, and he added that cinema has shown every day that it can overcome its fears. For him the answer is control: "L’unico modo per affrontarla è gestirla, con tutele e limiti alla sua applicazione." He also reported a recent visit from Ted Sarandos, Netflix's co-chief executive, who had looked at Cinecittà's sets and told him he understood why everyone wants to shoot there. Cinecittà had hosted Assassin's Creed for seven months of filming until the previous week, Saccone said, and the director Luca Guadagnino had chosen to shoot there on film stock.

Gabriella Buontempo, president of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the state film school, reached back to the Lumière brothers. When they showed a train arriving, she recalled, spectators believed it was coming at them, and every later change, from sound to colour, came with its own dread among stage actors.

Maurizio Forestieri, president of Cartoon Italia, the animation producers' group, was less reassuring about the pace. Animation has already crossed from analogue to digital, he said, but with AI the unknown is a system that learns more every day. His line for keeping people in the loop was not sentimental: "perché l’umano ha una storia, ha delle emozioni".

Who gets the audience: cinemas, creators and a Titanic pre-order

The exhibitors came with a commercial question. Fabrizio Larini, president of ANEC, said AI would first let cinemas identify the people who do not go to them, and give them different ways to reach those who have drifted away. It could also help tune programming and screening times to the audience of each film, he added.

He asked for support for a sector in which buying the raw material absorbs about half the costs and which, after years of technological standstill, now has to invest again.

Carlo Rodomonti, who heads the digital publishers and creators section at ANICA, gave an example of how that could work. A creator proposes on an app to see Titanic again on a big screen. With AI a pre-order opens, and if it reaches fifty, the screening goes ahead. Rodomonti said the innovators are no longer treated with suspicion: they belong in the conversation, he argued, and should serve the core of the system, which he identified as the cinema hall.

A creators' panel on October 29 pushed the same line. Fortune Italia's preview listed Andrea David Rizzi, who runs media and sports partnerships for YouTube in Italy and Portugal, among the participants, alongside creators and production companies, to discuss how social content and the big screen feed each other.

In Rodomonti's example the audience is counted before the screening, by a pre-order, and it is the creator's following that triggers the showing.

Faces, voices and the rule of the paperwork

The sharpest session, on October 29, was titled "Tutela dei professionisti nell’era dell’AI Act: voci, volti e nuovi diritti". Fortune Italia's preview said UNITA, ANAD and Writers Guild Italia would discuss the protection of synthetic performances, contract models and safeguards for people whose faces and voices can now be generated or copied.

Federico Mollicone, who chairs the Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, closed the regulatory panel with a statement released through ANEC. He described a comprehensive reform of the film and audiovisual sector, drafted after hearings with more than 50 categories, and a proposed law protecting digital alias, biometric data and copyright.

His line for the Italian industry was that the algorithm must remain a tool in the service of Italian creativity, "mai il suo sostituto". The proposal is a bill. The sources give no date for a vote.

The rules already in force are more concrete. Since August 2, 2026, the transparency duties of Article 50 of the European AI Act apply to certain content generated or manipulated by AI. Legislative Decree 160/2026 is in force. And the Ministry of Culture's guidelines ask producers to document their use of AI for the tax credit, the state rebate that pays for part of a film's budget.

Almanacco Cinema, an Italian film site, made the sharpest point about this in a preview on October 26, 2026. In its reading the revolution "è già finita nei moduli da compilare", and the sector is no longer deciding whether to accept AI but settling the price, the signatures and the credits that make its entry ordinary.

It also recalled what the text of the 2024 tax-credit decree already requires. Beneficiaries must say in the opening or closing credits which parts or stages of a work used AI, and contracts with authors, performers and musicians must let them refuse the use of their work, image or performance by AI systems.

Hollywood's earlier fight, and Netflix's count

Almanacco Cinema set Rome beside the United States, where AI became a labour dispute in 2023. The Writers Guild of America won terms under which AI-generated material is not literary material and writers must be told when they receive it, and SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union, negotiated consent and pay rules for digital replicas of performers.

Hollywood got there after months of strike, the site wrote, while Italy arrives with panels, ministerial patronage and mandatory registration. That is one critic's wry comparison, not a measure of which route protects workers better.

The industry side keeps its own tally. In its second-quarter shareholder letter, Netflix said about 300 titles in its catalogue had used generative AI tools over the past year, according to Cinecittà News in July 2026. It named the Indian sports series Glory, the Brazilian miniseries Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri and the documentary series The American Experiment.

For The American Experiment, Sarandos told investors that 17 minutes of material made with generative AI widened the series' scope and cut time and costs by up to half compared with traditional methods. He also said the aim is to use AI as a tool for authors, not a replacement for people, and that speed and lower costs matter only if quality improves.

Those figures are the company's own, given to shareholders, and the three titles named come from India, Brazil and the United States.

What the shorts showed

FUTURA26 also put the work itself on a screen. The programme included a selection of short films from Ai.Motion, a showcase of AI-made shorts, among them COSPLAI by Anna Coccoli.

Next to the screenings sat workshops. One, on October 28, taught producers how to declare AI use under the AI Act and the tax credit, and how to document tools and creative steps, what CrewReel calls department-by-department traceability. Another brought Adobe's Firefly and Express into a workflow running from a film's idea to its promotional campaign.

The two halves of the programme sit uneasily together. The same rooms taught how to log AI and how to refuse it.

The rules the panels dwelt on are already written: the transparency duty in force since August, the decree and the ministry's tax-credit guidelines. The one open item, the digital alias bill, has no vote date in the sources.

Sources

• FUTURA 2026 chiude a Roma: la filiera dell'audiovisivo a confronto sulle nuove regole dell'AI, ANEC, October 29, 2026