Recommendations of the Editorial team
Having a fully AI-generated film premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival will inevitably raise eyebrows – but Dreams of Violets could become a topic of conversation that goes far beyond the ethics of AI. The film, which premieres at the festival on June 10, depicts the plight of Iranian civilians in the weeks before the United States and Israel attacked the country this year. Filmmaker Ash Koosha, who is from Tehran and left Iran in 2009, shot the 75-minute film for around $2,000 using various AI services for video generation, voice editing, research and image design, Variety reports. Koosha produced the film along with his brother Pooya.
“I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions,” Koosha said in a statement. “I thought about these questions every minute of every day I worked on this film. My answer is: The alternative – silence, oblivion, the regime’s preferred outcome – is worse. The film exists because the dead have the right to be witnessed, and because the families in Iran who cannot speak deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”
A trailer shows a wheelchair-bound boy named Amir, who has cerebral palsy, as a family member explains to him that violets grow in the dark. It’s seething outside: people are gathering on motorcycles. A second story follows a woman whose family asks her to stop walking on the streets. Plus a man falling from a building, smoke grenades, a military crushing demonstrators. Ultimately, the focus is on five people who are about to be executed in an alley while Amir watches. The AI’s signature is evident in the blurry backgrounds – but the 83 seconds of the trailer suggest that Koosha, who spent three months developing and generating the film, has created a deceptively realistic work.
Thousands dead, tens of thousands arrested
The plot revolves around protests that broke out in January. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 7,000 people were killed and more than 50,000 were arrested.
Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Festival, sees the film as “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not just as tools for innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.”
AI has raised fundamental ethical questions in Hollywood: Val Kilmer was recently brought to digital life in “As Deep as the Grave,” and the Academy has introduced new restrictions on how AI can be used in films seeking Oscar nominations.
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