Flim Trend Report 2027, Vol. 2
Flim is the living archive and creative platform for tomorrow’s storytellers.
With more than 2M images and video cuts spanning global films, music videos, and ads, Flim captures creative shifts as they happen.
Last year, we closed our report with a prediction: as AI-generated content kept flooding the landscape, a new wave of productions would deliberately embrace a distinctly human touch.
A year on, that signal has become a current.
Across thousands of new references, the same impulse keeps surfacing: a need to hold on to something real.
Old traditions dusted off and worn like costumes. Bodies pushed to their limits, sweat and breath included. Sets cut from cardboard, glue still showing. And above it all, the machine’s eye, which creatives are learning to stage, dodge and turn against itself.
This report maps the four movements that reshaped visual culture in 2026 and are set to define 2027.
Trend 01: The Good Old Days
Sixties schools, weddings and hospitals are rebuilt like film sets, complete with uniforms and props. Held at arm’s length, these old-fashioned codes are staged for the costume and often pushed into the grotesque. Now that we’ve moved past them, we quote them, half mocking, half nostalgic.
Back to School
Pleated skirts, blazers and chalk dust: grown-ups crammed back into 1950s classrooms, retaking a lesson from a world before screens.
Yearbook portraits of young men in suits, a smiling schoolgirl in uniform, rows of pupils in white shirts and girls in blazers and ties.
Wedding Core
The white dress, the veil and the vows, staged with a smirk until the ceremony tips into the grotesque.
Big Cake
Towering American layer cakes, too big to be eaten and rarely meant to be, end up smashed, worn or sat in.
Framed shots of oversized cakes: a towering pale blue cake with cherries, a heart-shaped Valentine cake being sliced and a three-tier cake held up against the sky.
Doll House
Miniature dream homes, observed by women from a knowing distance, like the set of a life they were once sold.
A mosaic of dollhouse rooms, a giant hand reaching into a miniature bathroom, women posing in life-size sets and tiny houses watched from a distance.
Clinical Coquette
Starched caps and fifties lab coats, reclaimed by women who turn a sexist cliché into a uniform of power.
Trend 02: Hide and Seek
Surveillance gets its own visual language: CCTV framing, timecodes, infrared, makeup and masks designed to fool facial recognition. Filming from the camera’s point of view puts the viewer in the place of the one being watched, and that’s the point: it makes surveillance visible.
Operational Gaze
Bounding boxes, thermal readouts and CCTV angles: the machine’s eye takes over the frame, and the people in it become targets.
A grainy thermal surveillance image of two people, one locked inside a tracking box with camera ID text and a crosshair.
Shroud People
Faceless figures under matching drapes move as one silent mass, a motif shared by music videos and AI artists alike.
A grid of film stills showing figures hidden under white drapes and veils, a cloaked pair facing a burning house and faces pressed through stretched fabric.
Mannequin Uncanny
Masks that wipe out identity and stiff mannequins edging toward the robotic blur the line between person and puppet.
Six close-ups of mask-like faces and mannequins, overlaid with yellow face detection frames and crosshairs.
DIY Cyborg
Bionic hands, headsets and oversized goggles bolted onto the body, less a seamless upgrade than a homemade prosthetic.
A doctor wraps a blanket around a crouching person whose bandaged head is fitted with a metal frame and wires.
Trend 03: The Human Touch
Handmade takes over, with cardboard sets, practical effects instead of CGI, paper cutout bodies, rough collages with the scissor marks still visible, and lettering drawn or even stitched. Nothing here tries to look perfect, since the visible trace of the hand is proof that a real person made it. Faced with screen fatigue and the flood of AI-generated imagery, what can’t be faked becomes valuable.
Digital Collage
Flat cut-outs rebuilt in post-production, scissor marks and all, with the goofy charm of a scrapbook that never takes its images too seriously.
Tilted, overlapping stills mixing a woman in front of toy-like houses, a man with exaggerated lips and sunglasses, pixelated faces, cartoon dancers and a wedding photo.
Cardboard Sets
Sets built entirely from cardboard and paper, their trompe-l’œil tricks pulled off in camera rather than in post.
A grid of handmade sets: cardboard houses, a painted trattoria, cut-out rooms, paper shops and figures acting on cardboard stages.
Paper Humans
Flat paper figures step into real-world settings as fragile protagonists, asking what's left of the body in a digital world.
Life-size paper cutouts of people taped to a wall and a car bonnet, and a head entirely covered in taped paper scraps.
Modelling Clay
Plasticine makes its comeback in music videos and ads, every wobble and thumbprint left proudly in place.
Clay characters from stop-motion films and music videos, including a skull, a wrestler and a girl reading, cut into vase-shaped frames.
Handmade Titles
Titles drawn, stitched or spelled out in objects, giving back weight and texture to the name of the work.
A face hidden behind torn paper letters in Korean, with “Save the” hand-lettered across a black sweater.
Trend 04: Go for Gold
Sport turns into an aesthetic, borrowing from training footage, locker rooms and the purple track of Paris 2024, while stadiums double as fashion sets. Close-ups on skin, sweat and breath put the body back at the center and make effort almost tangible. In a life spent more and more through screens, it’s a way of feeling physical again.
Olympic Core
Sport’s codes are everywhere, with the purple track and blue lines of Paris 2024 absorbed as a ready-made colour palette.
A wall of small sport stills, from football, boxing and fencing to running tracks and locker rooms, with a woman hugging a trophy.
Treadmill Chic
The treadmill moves into the living room and beyond, as much a design object as a machine for the body as performance.
Six people walking or running on treadmills and an exercise bike, styled like fashion shoots.
Empty Stadium
Empty bleachers and grandstands become a graphic backdrop, all rhythm and repetition, waiting for a crowd that never shows.
A man sitting alone in empty stadium seats facing the pitch, above a grid of performers posing in vast, empty grandstands.
Alpine Style
Ski suits, goggles and mountain codes slide off the slopes and into fashion shoots, music videos and ads.
Stamp-framed ski scenes, a woman in fur holding skis, a mountain picnic and a smiling skier, over a close-up face in a knitted balaclava and sunglasses.
Slow-Mo
Slow motion stretches effort to its limit, breaking movement down into water, skin and muscle.
Layered film stills frozen mid-motion: hair flying on a dance floor, a horse clearing a jump and a man falling backwards under a cloudy sky.
Macro Textures
Extreme close-ups on skin, petals and droplets bring back the texture of the living, often in sport-driven campaigns.
Circular close-ups of water droplets, petals, cracked surfaces and sunlit waves on a black background.
The full report
1. AI cinema becomes a genre of its own, with its own look, its own audience and its own debates, as fully generated features reach theaters.
2. Celluloid returns as a statement, with 65mm, VistaVision and 16mm moving from auteur cinema into ads and music videos, where the format itself becomes part of the message.
3. Stylization wins over realism, as hybrid 2D/3D animation, painterly textures and graphic distortion become the way to say “a human made this choice.”
4. Navigable worlds replace the single image, with campaigns and music videos built as universes to explore across formats rather than films to watch once.