The Kalevala - A Few Selected Poems — Umberto Onza Designs

THE KALEVALA – A FEW SELECTED POEMS ABOUT CREATION

Is a whimsical, 21-minute, fully AI-generated short film released in 20th October 2026. It’s based on selected poems from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, reimagining the creation of the world and the birth of beer.

The film follows Väinämöinen through a strange mythological saga, guided by a narrator who carries the story forward from one unexpected turn to the next. As the tale moves from the creation of the world to the brewing of beer, the visual language shifts with it, moving between cinematic realism, 3D animation, and cartoon-like sequences.

Created as a non-commercial passion project, the film combines script, characters, visuals, moving image, music, and world-building through generative AI, exploring how human storytelling and new technology can evolve together.

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THE CHALLENGE

How do you bring one of Finland’s most iconic cultural texts into the present without losing its mythology, strangeness, and human depth?

The Kalevala is deeply familiar to Finnish audiences, but less accessible internationally. It is also often experienced as dark, serious, and sometimes distant. The challenge was to reinterpret selected creation stories from the Finnish national epic in a way that felt fresh, playful, cinematic, and humorous.

At the same time, the project set out to explore a bigger creative question: can generative AI support meaningful storytelling, instead of becoming just another flashy technical demo.

THE IDEA

A whimsical, 21-minute, fully AI-generated short film that reimagines the creation of the world and beer through the lens of the **Finnish national epic Kalevala.**

The Kalevala – A Few Selected Poems About Creation presents familiar mythological figures such as Väinämöinen and Louhi from
a more playful, cinematic, and unexpected angle.

Rather than making a traditional adaptation, generative AI was used across the entire production process, including the script, characters, visuals, moving image, music, and overall cinematic world.

Created as a non-commercial passion project, the film explores how storytelling, culture, and technology can evolve together while also showing the possibilities and limitations of AI in filmmaking.

THE INSIGHT

AI does not replace the storyteller. It gives a small creative team the ability to build worlds, ideate, and produce work that once felt out of reach.

Generative AI was used as a creative collaborator for visual exploration, world-building, music, character creation, and production acceleration.

Still, the human role remained essential. The vision had to be guided, the strongest outputs selected, mistakes corrected, and the final material shaped into a coherent film.

The project showed how AI can open new creative possibilities for small teams, making it possible to test ideas, styles, characters, and cinematic worlds with far greater speed and scale.

VISIBILITY & RECOGNITION

The Kalevala premiered at Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy in September 2024 and was later released on YouTube with Finnish and English subtitles, opening the project to a wider international audience.

The film was selected as a finalist and recognised as an honoree for Best Creative AI Work of the Year at the AI Gala by AI Finland and Business Finland, highlighting it as one of Finland’s standout creative AI projects of 2024.

Internationally, the film has received several awards and festival recognitions, including. Best A.I Short Film at SFAAF, Best Screenplay and Best Voice Acting in a Narrative Short Film made in AI at All That Moves International Film Festival, and Highly Commended for Best AI Film at Orion International Film Festival. It was also nominated for Best First-Time Filmmaker at the MEI International Film Festival.

Beyond awards, the project helped spark discussion around the future of AI, filmmaking, cultural storytelling, authorship, and the role of human creative direction in generative production.