‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? Ash Koosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still a Startling Portent of the Future
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- "Dreams of Violets" premiered at the Tribeca Festival last week as the first fully AI-generated film programmed at a major film festival, according to the Variety review.
- Ash Koosha, a London-based expatriate Iranian tech entrepreneur, wrote and directed the film, which is set in Tehran and depicts the January protests, state crackdown, and killings.
- The reviewer found the film dramatically unsatisfying, calling it "a barely scripted series of anecdotes" with an "uncanny-valley" quality and characters who look real but lack fully realized scenes or context.
- The film's total budget was $2,000, which the reviewer called the "buried lead" — the most powerful message being that $2,000 can now "buy a hell of a lot of motion picture."
- Koosha based the film on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts, telling Tribeca the onscreen figures are all based on real people; the reviewer questioned whether that justified the artistic shortcomings.
- AI's footprint in Hollywood is expanding fast: Steven Soderbergh admitted in April to using AI in "John Lennon: The Last Interview," Martin Scorsese partnered with Black Forest Labs in early June for storyboarding, and Darren Aronofsky used AI for Revolutionary War web videos.
- Koosha's company builds AI-based characters and has experimented with AI-generated pop music, prompting the reviewer to suggest he may be "exploiting the tragedy of his homeland" to craft an AI showreel.
Why it matters: The reviewer's 'buried lead' — the $2,000 budget — shows that AI can now generate realistic-looking narrative scenes at near-zero cost, with the reviewer arguing the economic implications for feature filmmaking outweigh the film's political subject.
