AI-Generated Drama About Iran Crackdown to Premiere at Tribeca

Next week a 75-minute drama about the crackdown on anti-government protesters in Iran in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts.

“I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. The film is a work of fiction, not a documentary. It follows a group of strangers caught up in the protests who meet by chance in an alleyway.

Koosha created every image and character in the film with artificial intelligence. He based the characters on people he has known, describing their physical appearances. He says it would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran. “Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.”

Dreams of Violets is the first fully AI live-action feature accepted at a major film festival. Last month an AI action-adventure film called Hell Grind screened at Cannes, though not in the official selection. An all-AI animated feature called Where the Robots Grow was released in 2024.

Koosha, who was born in Iran and has lived in London for nearly 20 years, made the film in two and a half months while continuing his day job as CEO of Claigrid, an AI start-up he co-founded with his brother Pooya. He used the chatbot Claude to improve the script’s language and structure, but he wrote the script, composed the score and edited the film without AI.

Some estimates put the death toll from the crackdown at more than 30,000. Koosha says the footage he saw on social media before the internet blackout prompted him to act. “For 72 hours, we saw things that were just horrifying. It was a bloodbath.”

He says the advantage of working with AI is that a filmmaker can change direction at any point. “You just open another session. You don’t have to worry that you’re rewriting. You multiply your imagination until something hits the right spot.”

Koosha plans to create characters using actual people for his next project. “Because now you can license real faces,” he says. He adds that actors could voice their characters and receive a share of the film’s profits.

He acknowledges that some actors may object to being replaced by AI. “That is a very valid point, and I think there are stories that I would never allow AI to touch, that we still need to do in the theatrical way.” He says the films he would make with AI are “impossible movies, a film that requires a $300m budget, and it doesn’t happen on this planet.”

Koosha says Dreams of Violets would have been “100% impossible” to make in the traditional way. “If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions. I spent under $2,000.” He also says traditional production would have taken a year or two.

He argues that AI can lower costs and open the industry to independent filmmakers. “An indie film-maker mind is often a lot more fresh and creative than an industrial film-maker mind,” he says.

Koosha says he is not a fan of most AI-generated films. “So far, I hate anything made that is made with AI. It disgusts me. I don’t want to look at it. It gives me a headache.” He adds that he tried not to use the technology in a crude way. “I’m not selling AI. I’m just trying to use a tool to tell a story.”

He voiced all the roles himself and then used AI to alter the voices. He predicts that AI will create new jobs. “I guarantee that this company will create at least 200 jobs that didn’t exist.”

Koosha says the economics of big-budget studio films will change. “I don’t think Christopher Nolan will make another $300m movie. Underwriting a $200m to $300m movie will not make sense any more.”