Two years ago, Kevin Friel walked into a Vancouver AI Community meetup with a wild idea: build a space where filmmakers could figure out this AI thing together. Not a pitch deck. Not a course you pay $2,000 for. Just a room full of curious people making things and sharing what they learn.
That idea is now real. The BC + AI Film Club is live, it's free, and it's already changing how we think about cinema in this province.
Last year, 250 people packed the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for BC's first AI Film Festival.
We opened with Indigenous ceremony—because protocol matters more than profit, and any conversation about technology on this land starts with acknowledging whose land it is.
Six films screened. Not polished studio productions with million-dollar budgets. Films made by people who decided the gatekeepers don't own creativity anymore. Films that wrestled with questions most Hollywood boardrooms won't touch: What happens when creation costs drop from $200,000 to $100? Who owns art when machines help make it? What does it mean when algorithmic randomness becomes your co-director?
The Q&As got heated. People argued about consciousness paradoxes that would make Peter Watts proud. We referenced HAL and debated whether we're building tools or building something that builds us. Nobody left with easy answers. That was the point.
Let's name names. Kevin—known around the Discord as Mr. Pixel Wizard—spent two years doing the unglamorous work that makes community actually happen. Showing trailers at meetups. Building the channel. Documenting learnings. Figuring out what works and what doesn't through pure iteration.
He didn't wait for permission from a film commission. He didn't apply for a grant and sit on his hands for eighteen months. He just started building, and the community showed up because the work was real.
That's the BC + AI way. Makers over takers. Ship first, polish later. Credit the people doing the actual labor.
Here's how the AI Film Club works: Free access. No membership fees. No tiered bullshit where you pay more to sit closer to the "experts." You show up, you're in.