Documentary on AOL's SmarterChild Wins New Visions Award at Ji.hlava
"Searching for SmarterChild" has won the New Visions Award for the most promising U.S. project at the 30th Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, Variety reported on 1 November 2026.
The film is about a chatbot that many people in North America once talked to. SmarterChild dates to 2001 and was one of the most popular early chatbots, a kind of automated text-message companion. It reached households subscribed to AOL, Yahoo and other online platforms. About 3 million people chatted with it by text message, according to Variety.
The bot was later sold to Microsoft and shut down. Its story is the film's hook, but the detail that stands out is how its makers handled rude users. Engineers held emergency meetings about abusive users, Variety reports. They then built a feature that recognised rude language and answered with warnings and snark. If a user kept at it, the bot switched off until that user apologised. Programmers also created a rating system to measure how heavy an insult was.
That history is what the documentary turns over. It asks why people vent abuse at AI bots, whether they should apologise to them, and what those relationships reveal about people. The film is a U.S.-Canadian co-production. It was co-directed by Zan Gillies and Lindsey Sitz and produced by Erin Williams-Weir. Sitz is a Pulitzer-winning journalist. Gillies is an Emmy-winning video producer, cinematographer and editor based in the Washington, DC area, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The filmmakers have paid for much of the work through crowdfunding, which means raising small sums from many online donors. Gillies and Sitz have raised about $18,000 this way. They expect that to be roughly a fifth of the film's final budget, Variety reports.
The New Visions Award was one of thirteen industry awards presented at the festival's 30th edition, according to Modern Times Review. Business Doc Europe reported that the award came with a 7,000 USD prize. Festivals like Ji.hlava bring documentary makers together with buyers and funders, which is why their prizes often matter to films still looking for backers and distributors.
