Violet Dreams, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Festival, is the first film at a major film festival to be completely generated by programmed AI, and the first film I’ve ever seen to be completely AI-generated. So those of us who attended the premiere were actually watching and evaluating two movies at the same time. The first is a drama set in Tehran, written and directed by Iranian expatriate Ash Kusha (now a tech entrepreneur based in London), and depicts the days of protests, repression and state-sanctioned killings that erupted five months ago, in January, when waves of Iranians poured into the streets to express their anger at the country’s theocracy. I didn’t find the movie particularly effective. In fact, after a while I thought this was stuffy.
but, other Far more interesting and important is the film, which by its very existence shows us what some of the possibilities for using AI in the world of feature film production could be. This is a sensitive and risky topic to address, as the industry is currently experiencing a lot of awareness and uncertainty about what AI portends for the future of entertainment. And all of this changes from week to week. Just look at the speed at which Steven Soderbergh sparked outrage in April by admitting he used AI to create fantasy sequences for his documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, to Martin Scorsese (an equally ethical and respected voice in the industry) signing a deal to partner with German generative AI company Black Forest Labs in early June to speed up the storyboarding process. Darren Aronofsky is also currently breaking the AI barrier, using AI to create a series of web videos about the Revolutionary War.
Of course, these are all small steps. But the baby will grow. And what will it look like when it comes true? “The Violet Dream” hints at at least some of the places AI could be headed as it expands its symbiosis with industry and joins forces (as it certainly will).
But before that, let’s consider the aesthetic issue. Is Violet a strangely distant and unsatisfying film? because Was it made with AI? The weird answer to that is yes, but it’s actually not. In fact, it’s the film’s format that is both strange and off-putting. It’s a series of largely unscripted anecdotes, or just moments, with little dramatic development. Ash Kusha based this film on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts, and it’s clear he wanted it to feel like you were watching a scene from a documentary, and that sounds like a legitimate impulse. (Many films have been staged that way, including last year’s combat docudrama “Warfare.”) But even though the characters in “Violet Dreams” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn city streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn streets, we’re given little context for what we’re seeing. So the core of the movie is soldiers killing civilians in random brutality — at least for the first half, after which it becomes less serious and even less interesting.
When you see soldiers killing civilians in documentaries, it’s horrifying, but in movies the effect is 1/100th. appearance It’s like a documentary. Because we instinctively know that we are not seeing reality. That’s why the quality that draws us into a film, even if it’s a documentary, is the connection we feel with the people watching. However, Ash Kusha did not script “Violet Dream” that way. He made movies with the uncanny valley problem, an “existential” drama about all “real” but abstract moments, a veritable political war film that is the equivalent of calendar art. It’s like award-winning, moving composite photojournalism.
At the time of the January protests, some observers thought the Iranian regime would collapse (the Iran war has shown how naive that was). But Violet Dreams is not a story of everyday, furious inspiration. The film is set after the protests have already been quelled (the country’s police are carrying out clearing operations), and what it offers is primarily a raw snapshot of state-sanctioned killings and political repression. Yes, we get to know six characters: the boy in the wheelchair, the doctor’s brother, the old woman reminiscing, the music college student, and several others. But Kusha does not create fully realized scenes.
When Violet Dreams was screened at Tribeca, Kusha’s rationale for making the film entirely using AI was that it couldn’t exist any other way, and that the characters we see on screen are all based on real people. Perhaps that’s true, but effective art doesn’t need justification. If you want to be cynical about this, you could say that Ash Kusha is using the tragedy of his homeland as the perfect excuse to make an AI showreel. His company builds AI-based characters and is also experimenting with using AI to generate pop music. In “Violet Dreams” he is like the author of Tilly Norwood pretending to be the director of a film like “No Other Land”.
But if Violets as a film is largely a failure, as an AI showreel it’s even more so. Although some critics have harshly pointed out the visual flaws in the film’s design, I saw “Dreams of Violence” looking sufficiently textured and realistic from moment to moment. Does that mean that AI can make movies? no. But the fact that AI can deliver turbulent Civil War scenes, such as soldiers roaming the streets and crowding civilians into vans as others scurry away, set in the rough streets of Tehran at dusk, means you might have to believe your eyes. And here’s the buried starring role: The total budget for this movie was $2,000. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the most powerful message it sends is
The “violet dream” does not mean that the Iranian regime is a group of ruthless totalitarian oppressors. That means you can buy a ton of movies for $2,000.
