A $2,000 AI-generated film will make its debut at Tribeca

Next month’s Tribeca Festival will include the premiere of an AI-generated film: Dreams of Violets. The 75-minute film is a fictional dramatization of the Iranian government’s mass killing of protestors in January, with the people and images fully created by AI, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter.

Dreams of Violets cost $2,000 to make and is “based on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts,” according to a press release. It was created by Ash and Pooya Koosha, two brothers who left Iran in 2009. Pooya co-founded Fountain 0, the company behind the film, while Ash serves as CEO.

Fountain 0 says Dreams of Violets is the first full-length, live-action, AI-generated film to be accepted at a major film festival. As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, a costlier AI-generated film called Hell Grind screened at Cannes — but at a side event, not the main program. The Pooya brothers say they used Google’s Nano Banana for images, Kling AI for video generation, and Anthropic’s Claude for language editing, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“We fully understand the very genuine sensitivities of those individuals working in the movie industry, and like them we are worried what the unknown implications are for the livelihoods of many,” the Kooshas say in the release. “But the reality is that this film never would have been made if it were not for the AI capabilities that we were able to develop.”

Dreams of Violets will screen at the Tribeca Festival on June 10th.