The First Fully AI Movie to Screen at a Festival Has Nearly Glitch-Free Tribeca Debut

If there are no cameras, actors, or sets, can Dreams of Violets, the first feature-length, live-action, completely AI-generated movie accepted to a major festival be considered a film? It’s a question Tribeca Film Festival cofounders Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro asked roughly 150 ticketholders to ponder at the project’s festival premiere on Wednesday.

Rosenthal lent her in-person support, reading an intro before the film where she acknowledged it had sparked “a bit of controversy.” But, as she reiterated in her own statement to Vanity Fair, Tribeca “has long championed artists who push the boundaries of storytelling and explore new creative frontiers.” Rosenthal also called the film “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.”

The 75-minute drama, inspired by the protests that spread through Tehran in January, follows five Iranians who meet in an alley before their execution. They are witnessed from a window by Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. The real-world tragedy left thousands of people dead. At the heart of the film are the real-life experiences of tech entrepreneur brothers turned first-time filmmakers Ash and Pooya Koosha. “Me and Pooya, we lived in Iran,” Ash told the audience before the movie started. “Years ago, we went to prison in Iran. We’ve been prosecuted. We’ve been beaten up, and much more. This is why I needed to say something.”

Without the AI, safety concerns and logistical barriers would have prevented the filmmakers from making the movie. “I would have preferred to make this film with a crew, with actors, with the dignity of a full production,” Ash said in a statement to VF. “That was not available to me. I am one person, in exile, with no access to Iran, no access to the locations, no access to the people. The AI pipeline made it possible to do what would otherwise have been impossible: to create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.”

Ash, who told the audience, “I actually hate 90% of what people do with AI,” was skeptical about telling a story without humans. “I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions. I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film.” Ash continued. “My answer is that the alternative—silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome—is worse.”

Ash Koosha, Pooya Koosha, Jane Rosenthal and Tom Rogers attend the Tribeca premiere for Dreams of Violets.Cindy Ord/Getty Images

While every image and person in the film is AI-generated, it is based on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts from which AI video models were used, including Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-based editing, and Google’s Gemini and Nano Banana for research and imagery, per the company. Dreams of Violets comes courtesy of Fountain 0, a new production studio dedicated to AI generated movies and TV shows.

“We’re all sensitive to the fact that there are people who earn their livelihoods from the current way films are made,”Tom Rogers, former TiVo CEO and Fountain 0 executive chairman, said at the premiere. “And the disruption AI is going to cause is obviously something that is not easy to digest.” But he hopes the tech will break down financial barriers for independent filmmakers. “What Ash has proven here is that you can create a beautiful, artistic film as deeply haunting as this film is,” said Rogers, “that can be brought to life at close to zero costs.” Dreams of Violets was made in about two months for just $2,000—a figure that made one audience member audibly gasp.

Dreams of Violets, a film inspired by real life events and entirely generated by artificial intelligence. It was written, produced and directed by Ash Koosha.

Courtesy of Tribeca Festival

Reactions were otherwise subdued during the film—a life-like, but glossy depiction of the Iranian regime that struggled to keep audience attention. Within minutes, a woman in my row had eyes trained on her phone. To be fair, there were more humans on the app she was scrolling than in the movie we were meant to be watching. Filmmaking is always a suspension of disbelief, but I was never able to forget that I was watching human suffering, as told by AI. Instead, my mind wandered to all of the man-made films I had seen in that exact AMC theater—listening to young girls squeal with delight during opening night of Barbie, or abandoning my popcorn for the bathroom as Timothée Chalamet went full-blown cannibal in Bones and All. Nothing like AI to make one miss the image of Chalamet dismembering his own (very human) costars.

The most human moment I witnessed while watching Tribeca’s first AI movie came when the woman sitting next to me hid her face in horror during the film’s torture scenes. It didn’t matter to her that the violence was computer-generated; after a sequence in which a man is burned alive, my seatmate walked out of the screening with 10 minutes to spare. The credits, in which only three men’s names are listed alongside a handful of acknowledgments, elicited laughter throughout the theater.

During a post-screening Q&A with the filmmakers, audience members seemed more curious, than concerned, about their AI-generated moviegoing experience. Questions were congratulatory in nature, although one festivalgoer noted AI’s inconsistency as a tool. Ash is aware there are some glitches in his movie. “By the way, this is the first time we’ve seen it on the big screen, so I just saw some things. Like, Oh no,” he replied, turning to his brother Poosha, who was responsible for postproduction. “Yeah, we have to have a conversation later.”

Ash reiterated that he used AI only as a means of telling a specific, time-sensitive story. “There are many films that I love that I would never allow myself to make with AI. If I wanted to make a Jim Jarmusch film, I would never do this, right?” he explained. “It’s opening up a new chapter in cinema,” his brother Poosha added. “That’s how I look at it.”

Dreams of Violets, a film inspired by real life events and entirely generated by artificial intelligence.

Courtesy of Tribeca Festival

Hollywood creatives including Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Reese Witherspoon, and Natasha Lyonne have begun to embrace elements of AI in storytelling, but the tech has nevertheless raised industry-wide alarm bells. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro was met with applause at last month’s Cannes Film Festival after declaring “Fuck AI.” In March, over 400 celebrities, including Lyonne, signed an open letter urging the Trump administration to uphold copyright protections for AI.

“Everybody’s worried,” DeNiro, who cofounded Tribeca in 2002, told Yahoo Entertainment earlier this year when asked about AI. “You can’t replace people,” he continued, adding that humans who work on these productions are the "heart and soul" of cinema. In that interview, DeNiro said no matter what happens with AI, “we’re going to have to deal with it. And hopefully, there’ll be good things about it and there’ll be bad things, with criminal intent [and] people up to no good. You’re going to have to deal with that too.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to DeNiro for additional comment.)

Dreams of Violets has no formal distribution; before the film’s Tribeca debut, Ash thought the project would be destined to languish on YouTube. Audiences at the screening scattered into the night, as there were more audible murmurs about the impending Knicks game than anything AI-related. But not before we all got a glimpse into the future of filmmaking. “They say that AI improves [by] doubling its capabilities every year. So think, in 10 years, if that continues to be true,” said Rogers, “that means AI will be a thousand times more powerful than it is today. And what will be able to emerge from that, who knows?”