Action-fantasy Hell Grind, the first AI native feature film produced entirely on Higgsfield, has dropped a trailer following an exclusive industry preview in Cannes on Saturday.
The action-fantasy was directed by Aitore Zholdaskali and co-written with Adilkhan Yerzhanov, a two-time Cannes Official Programme filmmaker whose credits include The Gentle Indifference of the World (Un Certain Regard, 2018). The film was created end-to-end on Higgsfield – a first in feature film history.
Hell Grind follows four inseparable street thieves – Roco, Lulu, Jax, and Rein – whose heist goes catastrophically wrong when Roco accidentally activates an ancient artifact that sends Lulu through a portal to the underworld. What follows is a globe-spanning race through a Tibetan temple and feudal Japan to recover what was lost, with Roco growing increasingly unrecognizable. The film pitches itself as genre filmmaking with genuine emotional stakes: “Fantasy as tragedy. Action as grief.”
Hell Grind was made by a team of 15 professional directors, DPs, and editors with backgrounds across traditional film and Higgsfield’s original productions, Arena Zero and Zephyr. The first 25-minute episode required 16,181 video generations to produce 253 final shots, a 64:1 curation ratio that reflects the precision and labor behind every finished minute. Total production cost for the 95-minute feature is under $500K, including $400K in compute costs and a 14-day generation window. Hell Grind was made using Dreamina-Seedance 2.0 and Higgsfield’s proprietary models Soul Cinema and Soul Cast
AI video tools today generate 15-30 second clips, with most output optimized for short-form social and commercial content. Hell Grind, at 95 minutes, demonstrates that AI can now sustain character consistency, world coherence, and narrative arc across a complete feature.
Alex Mashrabov, CEO and Co-Founder of Higgsfield, says, ”Hell Grind is a signal to the entire industry, and a showcase of what the technology is capable of at scale. Traditional production for a comparable film would cost about $50 million. Hell Grind cost us less than $500 thousand. By presenting this film, we are showing studios and creators that the infrastructure now exists to execute their most complex visions to life at a fraction the cost of traditional production.”
For director Aitore Zholdaskali, whose 2025 feature Sicko premiered at Rotterdam’s Bright Future and was selected at SXSW London 2026, the film represents something beyond a technical milestone: “It took me ten years to get my first traditional feature made. Most people who started with me never made it to directing movies. I started out shooting weddings and music videos, slowly building trust until someone gave me a TV series. Making a movie today feels like making an album twenty years ago: you need investors and big studios. But then the laptop changed music forever and gave us Billie Eilish. That’s what Higgsfield is doing for filmmakers. The next generation won’t have to wait ten years.”
Hell Grind arrives alongside a growing slate of AI cinema work made on Higgsfield, with platform-produced shorts currently selected at the AI Film Awards in Cannes, the Camgarro Awards in Munich, Waiff Seoul, and festivals across the UK, Spain, and Greece.
