At Tribeca, an All-AI Iran Movie Shows Film's Future (Or at Least Its Messy Present)

The traditional cost structure of filmmaking is facing a direct challenge from generative tools. Ash Koosha, an engineer and filmmaker, recently premiered Dreams of Violets at the Tribeca Festival, a 75-minute feature produced entirely through a mix of AI tools from Anthropic and Google [The Hollywood Reporter]. The project attempts to document the Iranian regime’s January 2026 crackdown on protesters, an event that claimed the lives of at least 7,000 people and likely many more.

Koosha’s approach bypasses the need for actors, locations, crews, or cameras. This method was born from necessity; with no way to safely film in Iran and no financiers to back a traditional production, Koosha used AI to conjure the narrative. However, the process revealed that replacing human departments with Large Language Models is not a simple substitution. Koosha described the difficulty of crafting a meaningful narrative as a Herculean task, noting that the role of a director expanded to oversee departments a physical filmmaker would never manage alone.

The implications for the industry are binary. If this method scales, it changes the entire aesthetic and financial proposition of Hollywood. If it fails to produce lasting value, it suggests the AI revolution in cinema is overhyped.

The production also highlights a new kind of creative volatility. Koosha noted that after finishing the first 30 minutes of the film, he realized he did not like the result, leading him to delete the work and start again. This level of iterative destruction is possible with digital assets, but it requires a different kind of stamina.

The industry is watching to see if the "dream-diary" style of AI generation can move beyond a technical novelty. For now, the technology offers a way to visualize histories that are too dangerous or expensive to capture on film, even if the process remains as taxing for the creator as traditional methods.

Ask yourself: If the cost of production drops to near zero, does the value of the resulting content also drop to zero?

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