Simiyu, Lies and Happiness

A quiet portrait of the thoughts and moments that shape the guests and workers of an inn in Australia around the early 1980s. John Kirk Kelly, known in the open-source community as KudzuEye, first made it entirely with open models, Z-Image Turbo and LTX 2.3, for the Arca Gidan contest as Susurration, Lies and Happiness, then added clips from Seedance 2 and retitled it to keep the two versions apart. A rare open-source-born film among the winners, it won a Merit award at Runway's 2026 AI Festival.