# Simiyu, Lies and Happiness

- Date: 2026-04-27
- Type: film
- Credit: John Kirk Kelly
- Genre: Drama
- Artists: [John Kirk Kelly](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/john-kirk-kelly)
- Made with: Z-Image Turbo, LTX 2.3, Seedance 2
- Award: Merit — Runway AIFF 2026 — Runway AI Film Festival 2026
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNPHDASoI7E
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/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](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/aiff-2026).

Links:
- About the film, on kudzueye.com: https://dev.kudzueye.com/work/simiyu-lies-and-happiness

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/simiyu-lies-and-happiness
Era: Early 2026 · The Shakeout
Last updated: 2026-10-19