Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial made an impressive world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, 2026, immediately emerging as one of the event’s most talked-about films.
Early critical reactions were highly positive, with the movie praised for its dark humor, visual ambition and ability to turn one of the defining technological stories of our time into compelling cinema. Variety even suggested that it could rank among Guadagnino’s strongest works of the past decade.
Behind this American story, however, is a remarkably Italian production. Artificial was directed by the Palermo-born Italian filmmaker and shot almost entirely in Italy, with Piedmont playing a particularly important role. Guadagnino filmed only five days in San Francisco, while most of the production took place between Turin, Ivrea and Reggio Emilia.
Turin became a remarkable stand-in for Silicon Valley. Production there lasted six weeks in 2025, following an initial week in California. At the Continassa complex near Juventus’ Allianz Stadium, the filmmakers used approximately 21,000 square meters, plus another 400 square meters provided by Juventus. Seven sets were constructed, including recreated terraces and gardens, while green-screen technology transformed Piedmont into the San Francisco Bay Area.
The production, originally developed by Amazon MGM Studios with a reported budget of around $40 million, therefore represents another significant international achievement for Italy’s audiovisual industry. It also demonstrates how Italian locations, studios, crews and technical expertise can support a major American production without sacrificing its geographic identity on screen.
Artificial focuses on the extraordinary events at OpenAI in November 2023, when CEO Sam Altman was abruptly removed by the company’s board and reinstated only days later. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, while Yura Borisov portrays OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz appears as Elon Musk, and Mark Rylance portrays Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence.
Guadagnino and screenwriter Simon Rich use this corporate drama to explore much larger questions about ambition, power, technological progress and humanity’s relationship with the intelligence it is creating. One of the film’s recurring cultural references is particularly Italian: Pinocchio. The story of the artificial child seeking to become real becomes a fitting lens through which to examine AI and the people attempting to build it.
That connection gives Artificial an unexpected bridge between contemporary California and Italy’s cultural imagination. Guadagnino combines the mythology of Silicon Valley with the industrial landscapes of Piedmont, using northern Italy not simply as an economical substitute for California but as part of the movie’s visual language.
The film’s journey is now continuing internationally. After its successful New York debut, Artificial is scheduled for its European premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11. Neon will release it in selected U.S. theaters on December 25, 2026, while its Italian theatrical release through I Wonder Pictures is scheduled for January 20, 2027.
For Italian cinema and Piedmont, Artificial is more than another major international production. It is a striking example of Italy’s growing ability to provide locations, talent and infrastructure for global filmmaking – while an acclaimed Italian director brings a distinctly European sensibility to one of the most American stories of the present day.
