An All AI-Generated Film Is Coming to Tribeca and It’s Sure to Raise Eyebrows
Kory Grow
Contact Kory Grow on X View all posts by Kory Grow May 27, 2026
The prospect of an entirely AI-generated film opening at the Tribeca film fest is sure to raise eyebrows, but Dreams of Violets may become a bigger talking point than just the ethics of AI. The movie, which will premiere June 10 at the fest, dramatizes the plights of Iranian civilians weeks before the United States and Israel invaded the country this year. Filmmaker Ash Koosha, who is from Tehran but left Iran in 2009, made the 75-minute film for around $2,000 using various AI services for video generation, language editing, research, and imagery, according to Variety. Koosha produced the film 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 have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film. My answer is that the alternative — silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome — is worse. The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”
A trailer for the film shows a boy in a wheelchair, Amir, who has cerebral palsy, as a family member tells him violets grow in the dark. Meanwhile, unrest is stirring outside as people gather on motorcycles. A separate story follows a woman whose family asks her to stop going out. And then there’s a man falling from a building, smoke bombs, and an army quelling protesters. Ultimately, it centers on five people who are to be executed in an alley as Amir watches. The signs of AI exist in the smudged backgrounds of the shots, but the 83-seconds makes it seem as though Koosha, who spent three months developing and generating the picture, has created a realistic-looking film.
The story centers around protests that broke out in January. At least 7,000 people died, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, while more than 50,000 were arrested.