{"id":505448,"date":"2026-06-18T04:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T04:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/505448\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T04:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T04:20:10","slug":"dreams-of-violets-review-what-does-a-film-made-with-ai-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/505448\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made with AI Look Like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cDreams of Violets<\/a>,\u201d which premiered last week at the Tribeca Festival<\/a>, is the first movie generated entirely by AI to be programmed at a major film festival \u2014 and it\u2019s also the first movie generated entirely by AI that I\u2019ve seen. As such, those of us at the premiere were really watching \u2014\u00a0and evaluating \u2014 two films at once. The first is a drama, set in Tehran, written and directed by the expatriate Iranian Ash Koosha (who is now a London-based tech entrepreneur), that depicts the days of protest and crackdown and state-sanctioned killing that took place five months ago, in January, as waves of Iranian citizens poured into the streets to register their anger at the country\u2019s theocratic regime. I didn\u2019t find that movie to be particularly effective. In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the other movie, which is far more interesting and significant, is the one that demonstrates, simply by virtue of its existence, what some of the possibilities might be for the use of AI within the world of feature filmmaking. This is a delicate and dicey subject to even bring up, since the industry right now is in the grip of multiple perceptions and anxieties about what AI portends for the future of entertainment. And all of this is changing by the week. Just look at how quickly we went from Steven Soderbergh, in April, ruffling feathers for admitting that he used AI to craft fantasy sequences for his documentary \u201cJohn Lennon: The Last Interview\u201d to Martin Scorsese \u2014 as moral and respected a voice as there is in the industry \u2014 signing on, at the beginning of June, to partner with the German generative-AI firm Black Forest Labs in order to speed up the storyboarding process. Darren Aronofsky has now crossed the AI barrier as well, using it to make a series of web videos about the Revolutionary War.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese, of course, are all baby steps. But the baby is going to grow up. And what will it look like when it does? \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d offers indications of at least a few of the places that AI, as its symbiosis with the industry grows and gathers force (which it surely will), might go.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut first, an aesthetic question: Is \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI? The strange answer to that is yes, but not really. It\u2019s actually the form of the movie that\u2019s odd and off-putting: a barely scripted series of anecdotes, or mere moments, with little in the way of dramatic development. Ash Koosha based the film on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts, and it\u2019s clear that he wanted it to feel like we were watching scenes from a documentary, which sounds like a valid impulse. (Plenty of movies, including last year\u2019s combat docudrama \u201cWarfare,\u201d have been staged that way.) But though the characters in \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we\u2019re barely given a context for what we\u2019re seeing: soldiers killing civilians with random cruelty, which is the heart of the movie \u2014 at least, for the first half, after which it becomes less severe and even less interesting.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it\u2019s horrifying, but the effect is 100 times less powerful in a film that simply looks like a documentary, since we know, in our gut, that we\u2019re not watching reality. That\u2019s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we\u2019re watching. But Ash Koosha hasn\u2019t scripted \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d that way. He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an \u201cexistential\u201d drama that\u2019s all \u201cauthentic\u201d but abstract moments: the v\u00e9rit\u00e9 political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art. It\u2019s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the time of the January protests, some observers thought the Iranian regime would topple (the Iran War has now made it clear what a na\u00efve belief that was). But \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration. It\u2019s set after the protests have already been contained (the country\u2019s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression. Yes, we \u201cget to know\u201d half a dozen characters \u2014 a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others. But Koosha doesn\u2019t create fully realized scenes.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen \u201cDreams of Violets\u201d played at Tribeca, the justification for the film \u2014 the reason given by Koosha to make it entirely with AI \u2014 is that it couldn\u2019t have existed otherwise, and that the figures we\u2019re seeing onscreen are all based on real people. Maybe that\u2019s true, but effective art needs no justification. If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that Ash Koosha is exploiting the tragedy of his homeland to have the best possible excuse to craft an AI showreel. His company builds AI-based characters and has also played with using AI to generate pop music. In \u201cDreams of Violets,\u201d he\u2019s like the creator of Tilly Norwood pretending to be the director of a movie like \u201cNo Other Land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut if \u201cDreams of Violets,\u201d as a movie, is mostly a bust, as an AI showreel it\u2019s something more. Several critics have nitpicked visual flaws in the film\u2019s design, but from moment to moment what I saw in \u201cDreams of Violence\u201d looked plenty textured and realistic. Does this mean that AI can \u201cmake a movie\u201d? No. But it does mean that AI can give you scenes of roiling tumultuous Civil War set in the hurly-burly of Tehran at sunset, with soldiers roaming the streets and forcing citizens into vans as others scurry out of the way, and it can make you believe your eyes. And here\u2019s the buried lead: The film\u2019s entire budget was $2,000. I don\u2019t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the most powerful message to emerge from
\u201cDreams of Violets\u201d isn\u2019t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors. It\u2019s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDreams of Violets,\u201d which premiered last week at the Tribeca Festival, is the first movie generated entirely by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,216048,61,60,80,171121],"class_list":["post-505448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-dreams-of-violets","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology","tag-tribeca-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}