Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, has its UK premiere as a Gala at the Royal Festival Hall during the seventieth London Film Festival.
Luca Guadagnino brings Artificial, his account of the days in 2023 when OpenAI removed and then reinstated its chief executive, to the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 11 October 2026, a late-evening Gala in the festival’s seventieth year.
Guadagnino was born in Palermo in 1971 and spent his early childhood in Addis Ababa, where his father taught history and Italian literature, before the family returned to Sicily in 1977. A Super 8 camera from his mother started him filming at about nine. His first feature, The Protagonists, opened at Venice in 1999 with Tilda Swinton, and the Desire trilogy of I Am Love, A Bigger Splash and Call Me by Your Name brought him international recognition. Bones and All won him the Silver Lion for direction in 2022, and Challengers, Queer and After the Hunt followed.
Artificial is written by Simon Rich and follows Sam Altman through his removal and return at OpenAI. Andrew Garfield, who trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and has two Academy Award nominations, for Hacksaw Ridge and Tick, Tick… Boom!, plays Altman, with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati and Mark Rylance alongside them.
The film has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 5 October, and the London Gala is its first screening in Britain.