SF Honors: Artificial

Directed by Luca Guadagnino  |  USA  |  140 min

Luca Guadagnino brings his singular cinematic sensibility to Artificial, a darkly comic story spanning two decades in the race to develop artificial general intelligence.

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Guests Expected
The program will feature a special onstage conversation with Director Luca Guadagnino and Actors Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, and Yura Borisov.

Description

Luca Guadagnino brings his singular cinematic sensibility to Artificial, a darkly comic story spanning two decades in the race to develop artificial general intelligence. With Sam Altman and OpenAI at its center, the film exposes the volatile personalities and power struggles driving one of the most consequential technological enterprises of our time. Andrew Garfield stars as Altman, leading a standout cast that includes Yura Borisov as the film’s disarming moral compass, alongside Mark Rylance, Ike Barinholtz, and Cooper Hoffman. Their performances lend wit and humanity to a story whose implications reach far beyond Silicon Valley. Blending sharp satire with unsettling revelations, Guadagnino delivers a provocative portrait of the people wielding extraordinary influence over a technology that could fundamentally reshape our lives.—Jessie Fairbanks

SF Honors is an award presented by SFFILM as part of our fall programming and made possible by support from SFFILM Board Member Todd Traina and philanthropist Diane B. Wilsey. SF Honors showcases exciting new work from singular filmmakers, presenting sneak peeks and premieres for Bay Area audiences.

Attendee Information

This program goes on sale to SFFILM members starting Wednesday, October 28 at 10AM, with a 48-hour exclusive member sales window. The program goes on sale to the general public at 10AM on Friday, October 30. Not a member? Join or renew today!

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Biographies

Director Luca Guadagnino

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is an Academy Award, BAFTA, and Grammy nominee. Renowned for his bold and emotionally resonant work, his films include The Protagonists (1999), I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), Call Me by Your Name (2017), Suspiria (2018), Bones and All (2022), Challengers (2024), Queer (2024) and After the Hunt (2025).

As well as his features, Guadagnino served as co-creator, showrunner, and director of the acclaimed HBO series We Are Who We Are. In addition, Guadagnino has directed such notable documentaries as Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory (2002), Mundo Civilizado (2003), Walking Stories (2013), and The Staggering Girl (2019), Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (2020), Bertolucci on Bertolucci (2018) and Joie de vivre (2026).

Actor Andrew Garfield

Andrew Garfield is a two-time Academy Award ® – and Emmy Award ® -nominated, and Golden Globe ® – and Tony ® Award-winning actor, known for his transformative performances in film and on stage for over a decade.

Garfield will next be seen in The Magic Faraway Tree, based on Enid Blyton’s classic, directed by Ben Gregor and co-starring Claire Foy. Garfield was last seen in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, written by Nora Garrett and starring alongside Julia Roberts, Michael Stuhlbarg and Ayo Edebiri. The film is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

He is currently in production on AppleTV+’s Limited Series Wild Things starring alongside Jude Law, where both are serving as executive producers. Based on the Apple original podcast, Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy, the eight-episode, hour-long series tells the wild ride relationship tale of two of the greatest showman-magicians in history who, along with their white tigers, are tasked with turning Sin City into a family-friendly destination.

Other film credits include We Live in Time (2024) directed by John Crowley and co-starring Florence Pugh; The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2024) opposite Jessica Chastain; Spider-Man: No Way Home (2024) opposite Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire; Hacksaw Ridge (2016) as Desmond T. Doss, earning Academy Award ® , Golden Globe Award ® , Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA nominations; Gia Coppola’s Mainstream; David Robert Mitchell’s noir-thriller Under the Silver Lake; Andy Serkis’s drama Breathe; Martin Scorcese’s Silence opposite Adam Driver; Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes opposite Michael Shannon and Laura Dern; Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2; David Fincher’s The Social Network, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe ® for Best Supporting Actor; Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go; Spike Jonze’s robot love story I’m Here; Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus; Julian Jarrold’s Red Riding Trilogy – 1974; Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs; and John Crowley’s Boy A, for which he won BAFTA’s Best Actor Award in 2008.

Garfield made his Broadway debut in 2012 as Biff Loman in Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Death of a Salesman, earning a Tony ® nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

Actor Monica Barbaro

Monica Barbaro is an Academy Award-nominated actor who has quickly become one of Hollywood’s most exciting talents, with an expanding repertoire across film, television and theater.

Currently, she is in production on the Oceans franchise prequel film, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, opposite Margot Robbie, Wagner Moura, and Josh Gad for Warner Bros. Most recently, she starred as the co-lead of Will Gluck’s romantic comedy One Night Only opposite Callum Turner for Universal Pictures. Earlier this year, she made her stage debut as Madame de Tourvel in a sold-out run of Les Liaisons Dangereuses opposite Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner at the National Theatre in London.

In 2024, Barbaro delivered a star-making performance as the iconic folk singer and activist Joan Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown for Searchlight, garnering Oscar and SAG Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress. In 2022, she also garnered critical acclaim for her breakout role as “Phoenix” opposite Tom Cruise and Miles Teller in Top Gun: Maverick, which received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

Her previous credits include Ricky D’Ambrose’s Spirit Award-winning independent feature, The Cathedral, two seasons of Netflix’s action-comedy series FUBAR, At Midnight, Chicago Justice, Chicago P.D., The Good Cop, and Unreal.