What Does a Film Made with AI Look Like?

“Dreams of Violets,” which premiered last week at the Tribeca Festival, is the first movie generated entirely by AI to be programmed at a major film festival — and it’s also the first movie generated entirely by AI that I’ve seen. As such, those of us at the premiere were really watching — and evaluating — 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’s theocratic regime. I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective. In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying. 

But 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 “John Lennon: The Last Interview” to Martin Scorsese — as moral and respected a voice as there is in the industry — 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.

These, of course, are all baby steps. But the baby is going to grow up. And what will it look like when it does? “Dreams of Violets” 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.

But first, an aesthetic question: Is “Dreams of Violets” a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI? The strange answer to that is yes, but not really. It’s actually the form of the movie that’s 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’s 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’s combat docudrama “Warfare,” have been staged that way.) But though the characters in “Dreams of Violets” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we’re barely given a context for what we’re seeing: soldiers killing civilians with random cruelty, which is the heart of the movie — at least, for the first half, after which it becomes less severe and even less interesting.

If you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it’s 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’re not watching reality. That’s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we’re watching. But Ash Koosha hasn’t scripted “Dreams of Violets” that way. He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an “existential” drama that’s all “authentic” but abstract moments: the vérité political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art. It’s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.

At the time of the January protests, some observers thought the Iranian regime would topple (the Iran War has now made it clear what a naïve belief that was). But “Dreams of Violets” is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration. It’s set after the protests have already been contained (the country’s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression. Yes, we “get to know” half a dozen characters — a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others. But Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes.

When “Dreams of Violets” played at Tribeca, the justification for the film — the reason given by Koosha to make it entirely with AI — is that it couldn’t have existed otherwise, and that the figures we’re seeing onscreen are all based on real people. Maybe that’s 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 “Dreams of Violets,” he’s like the creator of Tilly Norwood pretending to be the director of a movie like “No Other Land.”

But if “Dreams of Violets,” as a movie, is mostly a bust, as an AI showreel it’s something more. Several critics have nitpicked visual flaws in the film’s design, but from moment to moment what I saw in “Dreams of Violence” looked plenty textured and realistic. Does this mean that AI can “make a movie”? 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’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the most powerful message to emerge from
“Dreams of Violets” isn’t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors. It’s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.