Adrian Daniel Botnariu

An engineer who went to film school

Adrian Daniel Botnariu came to film from engineering. He studied at ENS Louis-Lumière, the French national film school in Paris, took part as a director in the Atelier of the Clermont-Ferrand short film festival, and is an alumnus of the Drehbuchklausur Kitzbühel, a screenwriting retreat^[5][6]. Before his AI work he spent time at the Vodafone Innovation Lab, and his speaker profiles put him at more than a decade in the film industry^[4][5].

His early films were live action. In 2015 he wrote, directed and produced Der Anarchist, a 15-minute German drama about an anarchist who ties a planned bomb attack on the Bundestag to Germany's 2014 World Cup run^[27]. In France in 2016 he wrote and directed the crime short LeMat and shot two other shorts as director of photography^[7]. His German bio named his style urban transcendentalism: everyday characters forced to face themes far beyond their horizon^[6].

In 2020 he wrote, directed and produced Messer & Pfirsiche (Knives & Peaches), a 13-minute psychodrama in which a knife-grinder and a cook meet after 20 years and uncover a long-forgotten secret^[25]. It screened at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in 2021^[26].

Beyondflix Productions

He runs his work through Beyondflix Productions, his own Berlin company, and uses Beyondflix as his handle on YouTube, Instagram and X^[4][8]. By 2022 its slate held three projects he was developing as writer and director: CARGO, a 10x60 science fiction thriller series he would showrun, later renamed Minds of the Many; Beauty in Stone, a psychological thriller feature; and 21st Century Schizoid Man, planned as his feature debut^[7][28][29].

Minds of the Many follows a fierce drug diver trying to save her twin brother after a neuro-enhancer drills into his brain, drawing in the Chechen mob and the chip's creator^[28]. 21st Century Schizoid Man is a psychological thriller set in the underground metal scene, and it became the seed of his later AI series^[6][36].

The turn to AI

His first AI short on YouTube, Freedom is Taken, a one-minute Japanese crime thriller, went up in May 2024^[34]. In August 2024 came Okonchatelno, an AI short he describes as a metaphor for what visionary artists endure in an industry that keeps creatives small^[33]. He has put his position bluntly in a Short of his own: "AI will kill filmmaking... and that's a good thing"^[37].

During Berlinale 2025 he organised and hosted AI Fusion in Film & TV with LTX Studio, billed on his channel as the only AI-focused event at that year's festival^[17][18]. Speakers included Verena Puhm, Sebastian Ungrad of Storybook Studios, Stephanie Meisl and Matt Szymanowski, and a panel brought in Max Wiedemann, the Oscar-winning producer^{[17][18][19][20]}. He published the talks on his channel that April^[8].

His own keynote there presented 21st Century Schizoid Man as a hybrid proof of concept: a stripped-back table read with real actors as the emotional spine, with the visuals generated by AI trained on his actor's likeness^[16].

We didn't wait for perfection. We used what we had.

Adrian Daniel Botnariu^[16]

Commissions and microdramas

Fairground commissioned him to make an AI trailer for Vampire Economy, a horror comedy re-imagining of Bram Stoker's Dracula, released in March 2025^[12]. He then delivered it as a pilot episode for Fairground's AI-only FAST channel in May 2025^[11]. Its hero, failed jazz musician Vince Helsing, takes a janitor's job at a corporation whose CEO, Anton Lucard, turns out to be an ancient vampire feeding on his employees' artistic talent^[11].

In November 2025 he made PA553NG3R, a three-minute short on the subject DOOR, for The Dor Brothers Award, in the 72 hours before the deadline, with music by Brennt^[13]. In 2026 he moved into vertical microdrama: To Die A Rich Man ran in three episodes from January, and HAPPY in six from February^[35][10][38].

HAPPY is the story of a porcelain Sisyphus who shatters while rolling a giant eyeball up a mountain and is rebuilt with gold seams, kintsugi style, by a lonely potter, who then rolls the eye up herself^[9]. He cut it into Happiness, a 5:53 festival version, in April 2026, and says it has passed 12 million views on Instagram^[9].

In August 2026 he released Ballad of the Schizoid Man, a four-episode CapCut Original Series made with Director Mode in CapCut Video Studio^[14][15]. A hospitalised schizoid rocker escapes reality with Mush-Mush, his psychedelic mushroom friend, through a Berlin kink dungeon, a duel with Shiva and an absurd game show for the prize of reincarnation^[14][15].

Veil of Maya

Veil of Maya, released on 18 August 2026, was his entry for the Future Vision XPRIZE. The competition's official site lists it as an Official Selection, in the Top 65 of more than 2,500 entries^[2][3]. The same competition was won by Jeff Synthesized with The Gifted, and Hal Watmough's Slingshot was a finalist^[3].

In a post-scarcity future, humanity is harmonised through a constant neural connection called Maya, and a reclusive emotion designer has to cure the stagnation that follows by letting back in the darkness the system was built to suppress^[1]. He wrote it with Ioanina Pavel and shared creative direction with Daria Aras^[1].

A week later, Chris Branch and Andrew Davis reviewed it on AI LIVE Ep. 129, a Future Vision XPRIZE special, where it ran straight before Karim Youssef's Voyager 7^[32]. Chris praised the strings of yellow light, the marble textures and the tattooed, scarred heroine, Andrew said it had the best opening of the day, and Adrian joined the live chat to say it was an optimistic vision rather than a utopia^[32].

I thought this is his best piece. I told him of all the stuff that he's made so far.

Chris Branch, AI LIVE Ep. 129^[39]

On stages and in the industry

In April 2026 he sat on the Special AI & Media panel at Medientage München with Max Wiedemann, Georg Ramme and Nikola Kohl, at the conference where Mark Wachholz gave a keynote^[21]. He argued that the industry needs new processes rather than forcing AI into old structures, and that new creators need room, including in copyright, for a new medium to emerge^[21].

In May 2026 Mark Day interviewed him for ITVT's TELEVISIONATION at the Magnific Upscale conference in San Francisco about the generative AI tools in his work^[22]. He is a speaker at Warsaw Glitch 2026, and he has co-hosted a Machine Cinema GenJam in Berlin with Minh Do, where teams make an AI film in three hours^[5][31].

In October 2026 his sub-two-minute film Do Not Disturb was nominated for the Get Shorty Award at the inaugural Lumara Film Festival, where Marco Magario and Stéphane Benini were also nominees^[23][24].