Tribeca is screening a movie nobody hired actors to shoot. It is called Dreams of Violets. It cost $2,000. The price tag might as well be an insult. Or maybe it’s a warning.
Next month, this 75-minute feature makes its festival premiere. The plot? A fictionalized take on the Iranian government’s mass killings of protesters last January. Heavy stuff. The catch is that every single person, every frame of imagery, is artificial. Fully synthesized by machines.
Ash and Pooya Koosha made it. These brothers fled Iran in 2009 after the post-election unrest. Now they run Fountain 0. Pooya co-founded it. Ash is CEO. They say the film leans on journalistic reports and eyewitness accounts. They didn’t make this up out of thin air, exactly. The sources were real. The visual representation? Not so much.
“This film never would have been made if not for the AI capabilities.”
They aren’t shy about the controversy. In a press release, they admit the movie industry has legitimate fears. People worry about livelihoods. They are right to be scared. The unknown implications for working artists are genuinely bleak. But here is the rub. The technology exists now. The brothers used Google’s “Nano Banana” (likely a typo or specific code name) for images, Kling AI for the video, and Anthropic’s Claude to polish the language.
Fountain 0 claims Dreams of Violets is the first full-length live-action AI film accepted by a major festival’s main lineup. Technically maybe true. There was that other thing. Hell Grind? It cost more. It played at Cannes. But only at a side event. Not the center of gravity. The Kooshas made it into the big tent at Tribeca. June 10. Mark the date. If you are feeling brave. Or morbidly curious.
Look at what else is happening. Netflix bought an AI startup owned by Ben Affleck. They built an animation studio. Amazon ordered three AI animated series. Meanwhile, Critterz, made with OpenAI’s now-dead Sora model, is shopping for a new partner. The race isn’t on. It has already started.
Will it feel human? That’s the question isn’t it? You go to a movie for the feeling of seeing something else. Seeing a reflection. But when the reflection is code?
It plays June 10 at Tribeca. The doors open. The lights go down. Nothing moves that hasn’t been predicted by an algorithm.
