Tribeca to premiere first full-length AI-generated film, Dreams of Violets

Tribeca is set to open a new front in film history on June 10, when it premieres Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute AI-generated docudrama made for about $2,000. The festival says it is the first full-length, live-action film generated entirely by AI to be accepted by a major film festival, a low-cost production that pushes the barrier to entry in filmmaking down to almost nothing.

The film centers on five Iranians who gather in a Tehran alley before they are executed, with the scene witnessed by Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. Ash Koosha, who directed the film with his brother Pooya Koosha, said he conceived it as a memorial to an event he could not physically access and began after reading reports about the massacre. The brothers, who were born in Iran and left in 2009, made the movie over about three months from Koosha’s home in London.

Dreams of Violets was assembled using Kling AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Nanobanana and Fountain 0’s own technology. Its backers say the film draws on journalistic reports, photographs and eyewitness accounts, but its debut at Tribeca will likely sharpen debate over what happens when generative tools are used not just for fantasy or visual effects, but for depicting real political trauma and the deaths of real people.

That question lands with particular force because the film is built around the January protests and crackdown in Iran, which the filmmakers and reporting describe as having left at least 7,000 people dead and more than 50,000 arrested, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. Turning that violence into a festival selection gives the project artistic legitimacy, but it also raises the stakes: if AI can recreate a massacre for a fraction of the cost of conventional production, festivals may be signaling that technical innovation can stand alongside, and sometimes above, traditional notions of craft and lived experience.

Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca’s co-founder, praised the film as an example of emerging AI technology being used for human storytelling. That endorsement captures the wider industry tension surrounding Dreams of Violets. At $2,000, the project shows how rapidly the economics of production are changing. At the same time, the film’s subject matter forces a harder reckoning over whether speed, cost and access are now outrunning the ethical guardrails around truth, memory and trauma.