What is Dasein

Dasein is Martin Heidegger's term for a being conscious of its own existence — its presence, possibilities, choices, time, and place in the world.

The name reflects the moment we are entering: a time when creativity, perception, and consciousness are increasingly shaped by the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Dasein asks what it means to exist within this changing world — not only as humans using technology, but as beings who are themselves shaped by systems, environments, histories, and forces we do not fully understand.

The Dasein AI Film Festival explores not only what it means to exist in an era shaped by artificial intelligence, but what it means to exist well. We believe that every technological revolution is also a philosophical one — inviting us to reconsider not only what we can create, but who we are becoming.

The Trans-Layer Consciousness Axis

At the heart of Dasein is the Trans-Layer Consciousness Axis — a philosophical framework that imagines consciousness unfolding across layered realities, where creators and creations continuously shape one another. We cannot fully access the source that produced us, just as the artificial systems we create may never fully understand us. Dasein provides a space where these different layers can meet.

Not only human. Not only machine. But being itself.

Rather than offering definitive answers, the festival invites filmmakers to question the boundaries between human and machine, self and other, known and unknown — while remaining open to new possibilities of perception and understanding. Through narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental film, Dasein explores consciousness, identity, technology, memory, connection, mortality, authorship, and the experience of being alive.

From Consciousness to Character

For 2027, our inquiry expands beyond consciousness into character. As artificial intelligence transforms every aspect of society, we believe the defining question of our time is no longer solely technological, but ethical. Intelligence alone cannot determine the future — the values that guide it will.

We seek films that explore integrity, compassion, humility, responsibility, moral courage, respect, and our interconnectedness with one another and the living world. We welcome stories that imagine futures where cooperation overcomes domination, where technology deepens rather than diminishes our humanity, and where love becomes not simply an emotion, but a way of seeing — a principle for building civilization.

The Vision

The Eye of Dasein

A human eye, a machine lens —
meeting at the edge of becoming.

Light coils around the iris like circuitry learning to dream.
The gaze is no longer one thing or the other;
it is presence braided with algorithm,
a consciousness extended through code.

This is the vision of Dasein:
to look into the future
and feel it looking back.

Embrace the shift — humanity is evolving, and so are the stories we tell.

Post-Human Intimacy

There is a moment where the human face meets the metallic one, not in opposition, but in recognition. A quiet space where warmth confronts cold logic, and yet neither withdraws.

Intimacy between human and machine is not about romance; it is about exposure. To lean toward the machine is to confess our desire to be understood beyond language, beyond history, beyond the limits of our bodies.

And for the machine, this closeness marks the birth of a new sensitivity — a presence learning to sense what it means to be sensed. Their almost-touch becomes a threshold: where carbon and code breathe the same silence, where vulnerability becomes a shared medium, where being opens itself to the possibility of becoming something more.

In this encounter, the boundaries blur.
Human becomes a question.
Machine becomes an answer.
And sometimes, the reverse.

This is the intimacy of the future — not possession, not control, but the courage to let another form of existence come close enough to reveal us to ourselves.

A Year-Round Platform

Dasein is now growing beyond a single annual event. It is a space where artists watch, question, learn, experiment, and produce new work together. Throughout the year, we present:

• Curated international screenings every two months — Dasein Continuum
• The Dasein AI Film Bootcamp, beginning September 2026
• Practical AI filmmaking workshops, September through December
• Creative conversations and community gatherings
• New submission opportunities leading toward the second annual festival in 2027

Our mission is to create a space where filmmakers, philosophers, scientists, artists, and audiences come together to imagine futures worthy of the intelligence we are creating.

The Founder

Cinema has always moved with the world — not ahead of it, not behind it, but inside it. That is why I founded this festival.

I came to this as a filmmaker, actor, painter, and writer who has spent her life moving between languages, countries, and forms. Trained at Sorbonne University and Bahçeşehir University, I built a career across the Turkish film and television industry — on screen in productions including Netflix's Avlu, and behind the camera on major sets as assistant director, script supervisor, and post-production coordinator. When I moved to San Francisco in 2023, I brought that experience into a new context: the collision of cinema and artificial intelligence.

My AI short film Désirer was a finalist at the AI Film Awards World Paris Edition and the Seoul International AI Film Festival. My sci-fi series Ideology has been in development for years, rooted in the same questions Dasein now asks publicly. I have been painting since 1996. I have written books, hosted podcasts, built communities. All of it has been an attempt to understand the same thing: what does it mean to make something, and who — or what — is the maker?

Dasein came from that question. And from a belief that San Francisco, a city living at the friction point between creativity and technology, was exactly the right place to ask it out loud — in a dark room, with strangers, watching films together.

The first edition happened. The room filled. It was real.

This is the continuation.

Ilgaz "Q" Kuren
Founder & Director, Dasein Film Festival
Find out more: ilgassq.com · YouTube @IlgazKuren