Andrew Garfield is coming to San Francisco to talk about playing Sam Altman, and he's bringing Luca Guadagnino and much of the cast of “Artificial” with him. SFFILM will present the film with its 2026 SF Honors Award at a Bay Area premiere set for 7 p.m. on Nov. 17 in the Kanbar Hall theater at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
Garfield and Monica Barbaro are set to attend, with Yura Borisov and Guadagnino also expected at the event, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. All four are scheduled to take part in an onstage conversation after the screening, giving Bay Area audiences a chance to hear directly from the people who built a movie around the founding of OpenAI. The Jewish Community Center sits at 3200 California St.
“Artificial” traces the rise of artificial intelligence, with Garfield playing OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who was briefly ousted amid a power struggle in 2023, per the Chronicle's reporting. Barbaro, a Bay Area native, plays Mira Murati, OpenAI's former interim CEO, while Borisov takes on cofounder Ilya Sutskever — a character the Chronicle describes as the heart and soul of the film.
A Cast Stacked With OpenAI Figures
The ensemble extends well beyond its three leads. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, and the film also stars Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Rylance, according to AwardsWatch. Per IndieWire, Rylance portrays Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto professor known as the “Godfather of AI,” under whom Sutskever began studying artificial neural networks.
IndieWire reports the film pushes viewers through two decades of machine-learning research and technocratic recklessness that the outlet says have brought the world to its current AI crisis point. SFFILM's Jessie Fairbanks described it, per the Chronicle, as a darkly comic drama about the personalities and power struggles behind the advent of artificial intelligence.
From Alice Tully Hall to the Kanbar Hall
“Artificial” had its world premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival on Oct. 5 at Alice Tully Hall, IndieWire reported. The film's path to that stage wasn't smooth — Amazon MGM dropped the project in June, and Neon picked it up before the festival debut, according to the same IndieWire account. Simon Rich wrote the script.
Release plans remain unsettled. AwardsWatch reports the film opens in select theaters on Christmas Day and nationwide on Jan. 8, while the Chronicle has listed a Christmas Day 2026 release. Garfield, for his part, has said that playing Altman caused him to stop using ChatGPT, and he told Variety, per the Chronicle, that he felt scared about the technology's capacities and thought its promoters did not fully understand them.
Eleventh Year for SF Honors
The SF Honors program, now in its 11th year, has received a five-year extension through support from Todd Traina and Diane B. Wilsey, the Chronicle reported. Traina said San Francisco is living through the story of artificial intelligence in real time — a line that frames why SFFILM chose this film for the honor.
Tickets open to SFFILM members at 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, and to the general public at 10 a.m. Friday, Oct. 30, with admission priced between $45 and $50, according to the Chronicle's reporting. The honor follows SFFILM's 2025 SF Honors Award to Bradley Cooper's “Is This Thing On?,” which brought Will Arnett and Laura Dern to San Francisco for a similar post-screening conversation, and its 2024 award to Netflix's “His Three Daughters,” according to SFFILM.
