The Reviews of 'Dreams of Violets'

 

When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on Sunday, 7 June 2026, I promised to return and add a survey of the film’s reviews published after the opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 10th.  I got distracted, but now I've typed up the review round-up.  It came out longer than I anticipated, so I decided to post it as a separate piece.

[I strongly suggest, however, that readers who haven’t seen the first report on the film go back and read it before trying to make sense of the reviews.  I explained and defined a lot in the original post that I haven’t duplicated below.]

The Tech

In his review of Dreams of Violets in Variety (“‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? AshKoosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still aStartling Portent of the Future”), Owen Gleiberman stated:

[T]hose of us at the premiere were really watching—and evaluating—two films at once.  The first is a drama, set in Tehran . . . .  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.

I also see the criticism of Dreams of Violets as the evaluation of two aspects of the film: the AI technology in all its implications, including its ethical considerations, and the cinematic or artistic assessment—how good a movie it is, irrespective of how it was made.

I think I covered the ethical debate over AI filmmaking in the original post, and I don’t think seeing the movie has changed people’s minds about where they stand in that debate.  So, let’s see what reviewers said about the effectiveness or lack thereof of the technology.

In “Iran’s Political Violence In A.I.-Generated Film” (online: “The Violence in Iran Was Real. The Film Showing It Was A.I.”), Malia Mendez and Matt Stevens reported in the New York Times that among viewers, “Some felt it was evident that the footage had been generated by A.I. and not filmed, while others said they were shocked by how real the people looked.”

“Andres Ramirez, a filmmaker [Mexican; b. 1996; independent filmmaker],” from whom they quoted, “was critical, calling some scenes ‘cartoonish’ and akin to ‘early PlayStation 2 graphics.’  The characters’ emotional reactions, he added, did not always look genuine.”

The filmmaker added “that atrocities depicted by A.I. just do not have the same impact as ‘the real thing,’ and continued, ‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

In the Financial Times (“AI-generated film about Iran protests turns tragedy into slop”), Nicolas Rapold expressed the opinion that “the movie . . . arrives with the growing pains of AI evident in every aspect—less proof of concept than cautionary tale.”

Observes Rapold, “technically [the movie is] a mess.  The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions.  They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.  In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled . . . .”  He adds, “AI’s tendency to homogenise [sic] reality keeps undermining any attempts to make the portrayal of resistance feel grounded.”

In conclusion, Rapold asserts, “Dreams of Violets is better described as a vibe—a prolonged evocation of concussed trauma—rather than a fully realised [sic] movie.  AI cinema still awaits its Lumière brothers.”

[The most significant accomplishment of the Lumière brothers (Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), French manufacturers of photography equipment, was the invention of the Cinématographe (1895), an all-in-one device capable of capturing, printing, and projecting motion pictures.  This breakthrough paved the way for the birth of cinema as a mass medium and entertainment industry.]

Gleiberman, in his Variety notice, first asks “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.”  (I’ll get to his “aesthetic” answer in a bit.)

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.

[I was unfamiliar with the expression “uncanny valley” (or “uncanny valley effect”) so, for others in the same boat, according to Wiktionary, it means:

Digital or ambiguous physical spaces that create a sense of unease or eeriness due to deviations from familiar patterns that challenge perception and categorization, leading to discomfort. (e.g., liminal spaces, haunted houses, the Backrooms, etc.).

[The phrase is a literal translation of a Japanese expression first used in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1927-2025) from his essay entitled “Bukimi No Tani” (“The Uncanny Valley”).  The terms both come up often in reviews of Dreams of Violets.]

“But if ‘Dreams of Violets,’ as a movie, is mostly a bust,” concludes Gleibman, “as an AI showreel it’s something more.”  He elucidates:

[W]hat 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.  

Then, his clincher:

And here’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. . . .  [T]he 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.

In “‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: An AI-Generated Movie Is Worrisome for All the Right Reasons” on The Wrap, Matthew Creith observes, “Memories blur together, and faces appear and quickly vanish like vignettes without a motive.  Whether intentional or not, the dreamlike nature of AI-generated moving imagery often mirrors emotional reality rather than depicting actual emotions through acting or historical reenactments.” 

The Wrap reviewer continues:

The limitations of current technology are impossible to ignore on the artificial intelligence front.  Characters frequently move with an unnatural stiffness while [Ash] Koosha lingers on close-ups of eyelashes and tears to signify the detail that AI is supposed to be good at creating.  Facial expressions often feel generic rather than lived-in, and frequent quick cuts are distracting at best.  The dialogue, much of it generated from Koosha’s own vocal performances and modified through common AI tools, can sound muddy and disconnected from the images on screen.

When a film like this, despite its short runtime, is asking viewers to engage with real human suffering, that emotional disconnect can be difficult to overcome.

Describing what I understand as the “uncanny valley effect,” Creith reports:

The faces in “Dreams of Violets” often feel ghostly, almost suspended between existence and disappearance.  The streets of Tehran seem simultaneously real and imagined, sort of like Spike Jonze’s [b. 1969] “Her” [Warner Bros., 2013] without the authenticity of its central characters.  Rather than recreating reality with documentary precision, the film exists in a liminal space between memory and testimony.

In The Indypendent [sic] (“The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical”), a progressive newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, that covers local, national and international news; food; cinema; and culture, John Teufel complained that

at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI—which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!).  Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense.   When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles.  More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen.  When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.

[Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies.  He’s best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication.  His concept of hyperreality is complex and hard to explain in a few words, so I suggest readers who want to unpack this comment look it up for themselves and try to sort it out.  The simple definition is that Baudrillardian hyperreality is a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so seamlessly that we can no longer tell the difference.  In this state, simulations, images, and media models replace the original reality, becoming “more real than real.”

[As for “cash-grab,” Teufel reports later in his column, “[Ash] Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people.”  He lists some of Koosha’s tech holdings to suggest that the film’s creator is promoting his commercial enterprises to sell his services.]

The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again . . . .  Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details.  Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices—all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”

The Indypendent review-writer notes that the movie “is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game.  A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand.  A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out.  Someone is shot—there is no bullet wound.”  And so on. 

The Art

The Times didn’t have much to say about the movie as a movie, but filmmaker Ramirez, while offering the opinion that “‘Dreams of Violets’ would be the most-talked-about movie of the festival,” mused, “‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

FT’s Rapold found “The film’s very loose train of events returns to a few largely perfunctory characters—a doctor, a young pianist, a boy in a wheelchair watching from a window—while cycling through street scenes of security forces attacking protesters.”  He added that the characters “move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.

“There’s also no substitute for good writing,” he admonished: “the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: ‘I don’t have anything but music.’”

“Koosha . . . appears to weave in actual audio recorded by protesters,” reports Rapold, which a “more documentary-oriented version of the movie might have emphasised [sic] . . ., so it’s maddening to hear sometimes barely audible snippets playing in the background of scenes.” 

Rapold observed that “scenes are shoddily realized [sic]: a tone-deaf replay of the wheelchair-bound child’s parents dying in a car that flies off a cliff; a street scene involving a falling loaf of bread that wobbles in slow-motion.”

In his assessment of Dreams of Violets in Variety, Gleiberman said of the “first” movie, the “drama set in Tehran,” “I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective.  In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.”

I gave the Variety reviewer’s technical response to his “aesthetic question above, but here’s the artistic response:

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. . . .  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 . . . .

“Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes,” writes Gleibman.

“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.

The justification Koosha gives for making Dreams of Violets with AI is that it couldn’t have been made any other way.  Says Gleibman:

[B]ut 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.

This is Gleibman’s version of the “cash-grab” scenario, and makes the same point that The Indypendent’s Teufel made about Koosha’s AI businesses.

On The Wrap, Creith observes, “Rather than following a traditional narrative, the film drifts between interconnected stories . . . .” 

The result often feels less like a conventional feature and more like fragments of memory stitched together.  Scenes emerge and fade as characters cross paths, without necessarily creating a clear narrative throughline.  At times, the experience is meant to feel like watching a documentary, though it evokes emotions akin to flipping through a collection of postcards from a traumatic moment in history.

. . . .

The strongest moments arrive when Koosha focuses less on spectacle and more on human experience, though these are few and far between and obviously not actually human.

The Wrap review-writer concludes:

As an experimental and timely film, “Dreams of Violets” is uneven, frequently frustrating, and undeniably flawed.  As a snapshot of where both filmmaking and AI technology currently stand, it may ultimately prove more significant than the movie itself.  What cannot be denied is that it leaves an impression, whether good or bad, and the movie deserves the conversation that will undoubtedly surround it.

At the very least, “Dreams of Violets” remains one of the most unusual and thought-provoking films playing at Tribeca this year.

At the start of his review, The Indypendent’s Teufel gives his mindset away: “Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets . . . I had one serious fear: what if it was good?”  His fears don’t materialize: “As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.”

“I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time,” he confirms.  (Do you suppose it’s relevant that Teufel is German for ‘devil’?  Naah!)

The reviewer expands a little on his pronouncements:

If you are going to see Dreams of Violets—which you should not—I urge you to read up on these events [the January 2026 protests in Tehran] before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes.  Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers.  There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point).  If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting.  As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.

“The film entirely lacks narrative logic,” complains Teufel, “making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by.  After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.”  Adds the reviewer, “And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express [Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004].”

[Some critics panned The Polar Express’s character animation for dipping into the uncanny valley, because it seemed to falter in mimicking realistic facial expressions and emotions.]

“It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause,” Teufel concluded. “When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped.  The vibe was funereal.”

[It seems to me, from reading these and other reviews, that the artistic weaknesses in Dreams of Violets are the fault of the fact that Ash Koosha isn’t either a screenwriter or a filmmaker.  He’s essentially an amateur and he worked alone, without even an editor to advise him. 

[So, when it came to making choices about how to frame a scene or write a piece of dialogue, he had nowhere to go except his untrained eye and ear.  No wonder he made bad choices.

[On the other plane, however, where his expertise lay, he had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of the medium.  But that’s just temporary.  Variety points out that

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.

[Some day, and probably soon, given the speed at which time passes in the cyber world, AI will be able to compensate for all the problems the reviewers above all spotlighted.  That may or may not be a goof thing for the industry, but it’s gonna happen sure as God made little green apples.

[In the hands of an actual filmmaker with a real screenplay, Dreams of Violets will become just a far-off—in computer terms—memory, like black-and-white TV or color TV with the colors that bled.]

'Dreams of Violets': AI Movie Première

 

[In recent weeks, both the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union that represents professionals in the media, including film and television, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization which presents the Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, have enacted firm rules to restrict artificial intelligence. 

[SAG-AFTRA secured a tentative agreement imposing stricter rules on synthetic characters, among other restrictions.  In May, the union reached a tentative four-year contract agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers which, while it doesn’t completely ban synthetic digital characters, it heavily disincentivizes their use.  Studios must prove that a synthetic character adds “significant additional value” that a live union actor can’t provide.

[If a studio wishes to use a fully synthetic performer (like, say, Tilly Norwood), it must formally notify SAG-AFTRA and enter a specific negotiation and arbitration system.  If an agreement isn’t reached, the union can arbitrate for damages that exceed standard human-actor compensation. 

[Pending ratification by the membership, the SAG-AFTRA contract with AMPTP will run from 1 July 2026 through 30 June 2030.

[Also in May, the Academy updated its eligibility rules for the 99th Academy Awards (scheduled for March 2027), drawing a hard line around core creative categories.  Only roles “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” are eligible for Academy Awards.  This effectively bans synthetic or fully AI-generated performers from receiving acting nominations.

[The rules also now explicitly codify that screenplays must be entirely "human-authored to be eligible" for Best Original or Adapted Screenplay.  Submitters must sign a formal declaration confirming human creation; false declarations result in immediate disqualification.

[Generative AI remains permitted in technical fields like Best Visual Effects.  The Academy stated that AI tools used outside of acting and writing will “neither help nor harm” a film’s overall nomination chances.

[The AMPAS restrictions take effect immediately for the 99th Academy Awards cycle and apply to all feature films with a qualifying theatrical release between 1 January and 31 December 2026.  The Board of Governors reviews its campaign and eligibility rules annually, however, so these AI guidelines will be re-evaluated and potentially updated every spring ahead of future Oscar cycles.

[So, now Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute feature-length docudrama that is the first fully AI-generated live-action feature film ever accepted into the official lineup of a marquee film festival, is scheduled to make its world première on Wednesday, 10 June 2026—that’s three days from now.

[(Hell Grind, a 2026 95-minute AI-generated sci-fi action-fantasy movie made by Aitore Zholdaskali [b. 1996], director and co-writer, and Adilkhan Yerzhanov [b. 1982], co-writer, two experienced and respected Kazakh filmmakers based in Almaty, premièred on 16 May 2026 at the Cannes Film Festival.  It was, however, a peripheral event of the festival, not in the official program.

[(The Tribeca Film Festival takes place from Wednesday, 3, to Sunday, 14 June, in New York City at various locations around Manhattan.  The screening of Dreams of Violets on the 10th will be at the AMC 19th Street East 6, located at 890 Broadway at East 19th Street in the Flat Iron District of Manhattan, near Union Square.  [For the festival, the theater is designated the “AMC Flat Iron Theatre.”  This is a temporary event name used for special film screenings hosted at the Tribeca Festival.])

[Because every visual aspect, background, and character was built using generative AI platforms, the film’s première has sparked significant discussion regarding the ethics and future of AI technology in Hollywood filmmaking.  The primary controversy surrounding Dreams of Violets is the displacement of human jobs in the film industry, as the feature was created by just two filmmakers on a $2,000 budget, eliminating traditional roles like actors, cinematographers, and set designers.

[On other topics, critics question whether AI-generated content possesses genuine human emotion and soul.  Controversy also remains over whether AI models were trained on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.  Finally, purists argue that major festivals like Tribeca should exclusively honor traditional, human-made cinema (essentially the same issue that the new Academy Awards rules address).

[After I heard the report “A.I. Backlash” by business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on the CBS Evening News of 29 May, I was interested enough to look a little more into this film “made with no lights, no cameras, and no actors.”  Below are the results of my investigation.]

Tehran, January 2026. Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute docudrama feature inspired by real events from 47 years of Iranian civilian resistance.  Through the eyes of five strangers, it brings protest footage to life with raw immediacy.

—From the producers’ plot précis

“At this time in history when both artificial intelligence and Iran are central to global conversation, [Dreams of Violets] offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand,” said Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Festival co-founder with Robert de Niro, in a statement.  

Let’s do the fundamentals first. 

Dreams of Violets is a fictional, Farsi-language (Persian) docudrama running one hour and 14 minutes that was entirely generated by artificial intelligence.  It was made in the United Kingdom by Fountain 0, a “film studio that blends traditional creative principles with frontier technologies to produce previously impossible movies and TV shows,” according to its own website.  It’s Fountain 0’s initial production.

The movie’s director, writer, and composer is Ash Koosha (who’s also the CEO of Fountain 0); its producers are Ash Koosha and his older brother, Pooya Koosha (co-director of Dreams of Violets and chief technology officer of Fountain 0), who are Tehran-born citizens of the U.K.  

They founded Fountain 0 (pronounced “Fountain Zero”) in 2025 to develop custom-built software to solve the technical limitations of commercial AI tools and to lower the financial barriers associated with traditional filmmaking. 

(Ash Koosha’s birth name is Ashkan Kooshanejad [b. 1985], and he’s also a well-known and popular multi-instrumentalist, composer, and record producer.  He’s based in London.  Pooya Koosha (also known as Pooya Kooshanezhad [b. 1982]—note the variant spellings of the brothers’ family name) is a tech entrepreneur, systems architect, and filmmaker.  He’s based in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.  When the brothers established their professional careers in the U.K., having fled the Islamic Republic in 2009, they simplified their last names for the Western tech and media industries.)

Dreams of Violets is a fully AI-generated feature film.  As CBS’s Jo Ling Kent reports, there’s “No cast, no crew” and “AI programs . . . generate all of the film's imagery.”

The plot, set against the backdrop of civilian protests in Tehran in January 2026 when the Iranian government perpetrated widespread massacres of civilians, centers on five strangers trapped in a shadowy dead-end alley by a soldier who’s about to execute them, while Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, watches in a wheelchair from a window above. 

Other elements of the storyline, as related in Rolling Stone, are “unrest . . . stirring outside as people gather on motorcycles.  A separate story follows a woman whose family asks her to stop going out.  And then there’s a man falling from a building, smoke bombs, and an army quelling protesters.”

Nothing that I read, however, provides an interpretation of the movie’s title, Dreams of Violets, and I gather that there are no lines in the script that explain it directly.  The closest there is may be some words heard in the trailer that’s on several sites online, spoken to Amir by a family member as he wheels away from the camera: “Did you know a violet is the only flower that grows in the dark?  The root doesn't need light.  It only needs a crack.  A gap in the earth.  That's all!”

Though not botanically accurate, that line is apparently symbolic of the film’s theme. First, violets bloom in late winter and early spring and thus appear in Iranian and Persian poetry as harbingers of renewal or rebirth after the desolation and deprivations of winter.  (Think of the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.) 

The “dark” certainly represents the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic and the brutal military crackdown under which the movie shows the Iranian citizens living.  The “root” might refer to the generations of Iranians and Persians who came before and cherished and guarded their freedom, as well as those over the past 47 years who’ve resisted tyranny in Iran.  The “crack in the earth,” then, might represent the small gaps where freedom survives today in the Iran the Koosha’s depict. 

The “dreams” of the title, then, would be the Iranian people’s vision of the hopes for the future promised by the metaphorical violets.  Even though the movie takes place in a dark landscape, both literally (the alley) and figuratively due to the communications blackout and the armed repression imposed by the regime, the Kooshas want it to encourage hope—a field of violets growing in the dark, waiting to burst out in color in the awaited sunshine.

The live-action docufiction was filmed in a mere three months at a cost of $2,000, with actors, sets, and cameras replaced by AI models.  Ash Koosha worked at home evenings and weekends while performing his duties as CEO of Claigrid, the bothers’ AI start-up, during the day.

Director Koosha observed, “It would take probably a year or two to get this right” in the tradition process.  “The notion of making films at the speed of news itself is something I’m super interested in.”  

With so “little first-hand journalism” coming out of Iran about the events of last January, Koosha was inspired “to make the first film about” the massacres.

There are no actors, or even digital clones (of either actual actors or real people on the scene) in Dreams of Violets; all the characters, though based on news photographs and videos, are entirely fictional digital models created using generative AI tools. 

The AI movie “is a specific genre, at least for me,” Ash Koosha told CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News.  It’s a way to tell stories much like animation, says the director-producer.  

Rolling Stone, however, reports that “signs of AI exist in the smudged backgrounds of the shots, but the 83-seconds makes it seem as though Koosha . . . has created a realistic-looking film.”

On the other hand, Business Wire expressed the opinion, “The combination of creativity and technological innovation resulted in a film that appears as realistic as films produced through traditional human labor.”  

The website found that the AI tools were “used to create a remarkably touching, impactful and at times shocking film.”  Business Wire states that Dreams of Violets “is indistinguishable from an independent film with human writers, directors, and actors.”

While the characters’ faces and bodies are entirely fake, their visual designs, emotional expressions, and the scenarios they endure were guided by real photos, journalistic reporting, and eyewitness accounts of the brutal suppression of protests in Iran. 

Co-directors Ash and Pooya Koosha say they designed the synthetic cast this way to capture a sense of raw realism without exploiting the identities—or risking the safety—of actual Iranian citizens and protestors.  Ash Koosha explains that he created the characters by describing people he’s known in the past—though no one living in Iran today—as references.

The Hollywood Reporter recorded that to make Dreams of Violets, in addition to Fountain 0’s own technology, the Koosha brothers used AI software tools like Google’s Nanobanana for imagery and core frames, Kling AI (developed by the Chinese tech company Kuaishou) for video generation from frames, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, and Google’s Gemini for helped with researching the project. 

THR further reported that, on the other hand, the writing and editing of the script, the voicing of characters (before alteration by AI), and the movement and positioning (blocking) of the AI-generated actors on screen was all done by Ash Koosha using human creativity.

In a statement recounted in Variety, Ash Koosha acknowledged,

I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions.  I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film.  My answer is that the alternative — silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome — is worse.  The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.

It’s significant to note that this particular story had personal meaning for Pooya and, especially, Ash Koosha.  The movie is far more than an artistic or political mission for its creators.  A recently published report in the Guardian of the U.K. reveals some of the reasons.

Ash Koosha began his career as a musician in Tehran playing in underground rock bands.  Rock music was strictly forbidden by the Iranian Ministry of Culture as part of the regime’s restrictions on Western-influenced music, so Koosha and his band were already in risky territory. 

In 2007, Koosha organized and played in clandestine, underground rock concerts.  After a semi-festival, initially planned as a cultural event with the support of UNICEF, was canceled at the last minute by the government, Koosha and his heavy rock band, Font, moved the gig to a private suburban villa outside Tehran.

The organizers invited 150 people, but word spread quickly in the underground scene, and 700 people showed up.  The authorities used soldiers and hovering helicopters to raid the unauthorized festival and more than 200 attendees and musicians were arrested because not only was rock music forbidden by the regime, but so were mixed-gender gatherings.

Koosha was arrested after the raid and he spent 21 days in a maximum-security prison among high-risk prisoners.  Two years later, in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election of June 2009, the Koosha brothers feared for their freedom. 

The 2007 raid broke up Ash Koosha’s previous band, Font, but the brothers formed a new indie-rock band called Take It Easy Hospital.  Ash was the front man, while Pooya served as the band’s bassist. 

Filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi recruited Ash Koosha and the band to star in his underground docudrama, No One Knows About Persian Cats.  The movie secretly chronicled the plight of underground Iranian musicians like Koosha.

The film premièred at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, just as political tensions peaked in Iran.  Following the heavily protested and violently suppressed presidential elections in June 2009, the Iranian regime began ruthlessly hunting down anyone involved in political dissent or unauthorized, Western-influenced media.

Because of their prominent roles in No One Knows About Persian Cats, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and their active participation in the underground scene, the band members were marked by the regime.  Promoting an invitation to perform at a U.K. music festival as their ticket out of Iran, the Koosha brothers and their bandmates left together.  

As soon as they arrived on British soil, they applied for asylum, stating that returning to Tehran would mean immediate imprisonment.  What they saw in 2026 must have seemed like déjà vu.  

It’s not surprising that the Kooshas, especially Ash, would feel strongly about Dreams of Violets.  As Ash Koosha says, “This is a very personal story to us having experienced brutality in Iran.’

As for those engaged in the project, but not viscerally involved, Variety reports that Rosenthal called the film “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.” 

“What moved us,” asserted Rosenthal, “was not just the technological achievement, but the emotional immediacy and urgency of the story itself.”  She added that “this film offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand.”

According to TechEBlog, an online media outlet and blog that covers the latest technology, Dreams of Violets is “a fiction based on reality” since Ash Koosha focused on “the human aspect” of the Iranian uprising “and not on the chaos itself.”

Although Dreams of Violets is fiction, not a documentary, “I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says director Koosha.

Director Ash Koosha observed that he had started to work on the film soon after he saw online reports and videos of the January 2026 massacres (which may have ultimately killed over 36,500 Iranians) before the Internet blackout imposed by the regime. 

“For 72 hours,” he attested, “we saw things that were just horrifying.  It was a bloodbath.”  What he had done until then, either in music or technology, hadn’t been politics.  “This,” he declared, “made me political.”

In a statement quoted by THR, he said that Dreams of Violets couldn’t have even been made if not for AI.  The director wrote:

I want to be honest about why I made it the way I did.  It was not a technological exercise.  I would have preferred to make this film with a crew, with actors, with the dignity of a full production.  That was not available to me.  I am one person, in exile, with no access to Iran, no access to the locations, no access to the people.  The AI pipeline made it possible to do what would otherwise have been impossible: to create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.

Tom Rogers, Fountain 0’s executive chairman, told DealBook, a New York Times newsletter, “The film industry is going to be transformed by A.I.”  He added that Dreams of Violets demonstrated that “great independent films can be made without big studio financial backing”—not to mention actors, designers, camera operators, and stage crews—among other workers. 

So Rogers conceded that there’d be “a lot of consternation” about job displacement as well, considering that AI fears ignited two strikes in the film and TV arena just three years ago (see “2023 Writers Guild Strike” [1 June 2023] and “‘The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City'” [25 July 2023].)

Furthermore, while Kent on CBS reports on roiling elsewhere in the film-and-TV quadrant of the AI-verse (of a trio of kiddie shows from Amazon MGM that are animated by AI, one creator dropped out prompted by “a backlash” and the creator of another AI-animated series became “horrified and disgusted” when the producers moved without her input), DealBook reports that the première of Dreams of Violets “could ignite a debate about the role of generative A.I. in creating original entertainment and provoke fresh fears about job losses in Hollywood.”

As Fountain 0 is about to début its first feature, the Kooshas see their AI-generated movie model as production-ready for independent filmmakers—despite the prediction that AI will bring about the demise of Hollywood.

Ash Koosha asserts that “for the many independent filmmakers, and would be independent filmmakers, whose biggest barrier is access to money to make their films, Fountian 0 technology solves for the financial barriers they face.”

“There’s no way for me to go get millions of dollars to make” Dreams of Violets, insisted Koosha.

For a traditional “Micro-Budget” film, for instance, the average production cost would be $20,000 to $250,000 in the U.S. or £16,000 ($21,600) to £200,000 ($270,000) in the U.K.  These are typically ultra-low budget projects, self-financed or backed by small investors.

A standard indie feature, which generally employs some union professionals, uses union-scale minimums, and must have enough capital to afford location permits, insurance, and professional post-production, costs from $20,000 to $250,000 in the United States and £350,000 ($472,500) to £1.5 million ($2.025 million) in the U.K.

At the high end, a full studio production requiring union crew rates, substantial visual effects, A-list talent, and comprehensive marketing, if made in the U.S., would cost between $5 million and $100+ million, while a top-end film made in the United Kingdom would run from £4 million ($5.4 million) to £60+ million ($81+ million).

“As a first time film creator, there is no way I could have brought this film to fruition without what our AI tools enabled me to do,” declared Ash Koosha, responding to the anxiety expressed by many in the film world.  

Foundation 0 has two more films in production, and Ash Koosha pledges that “we will actively seek top writer and director talent whose creativity can be harnessed to produce great movies without their imaginations and visions facing any financial constraints.”

Added brother Pooya:

Having been deeply involved for a number of years in how AI could be utilized and tamed at the highest and most sophisticated levels, I realized our video production techniques were way ahead of the rest of the marketplace.  I also realized that our ability for each subsequent film to improve on our AI production techniques is an enormous opportunity for Fountain 0 to exploit.

[If, after Wednesday, there are reviews of Dreams of Violets, I may append one or two to this post.  Come back then if you’re curious about the reception of this AI movie by the press—film and/or tech.  You can be sure I’ll be looking around the ’Net to see what’s being said.

[If there are a range of assessments, it could be very interesting.  One commentator has already raised a disturbing prospect.  In an exchange on the CBC website, Richard Lachman, a professor of digital media at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI (Routledge, 2026), put forth that the appearance of AI movies at film festivals could be the source of problems.

On the one hand, he said, there’s been vocal pushback within the industry, but on the other, the technology has the potential to open up access to filmmaking.

“This film was made for $2,000 [US], and it’s in festival competition. So there’s a democratizing effect,” he said. 

“You don’t have access to a huge film crew and sets and A-list actors? Well, you can still make your unique point of view and get it in a film festival.”

But Lachman said he has concerns about how audiences will interpret AI content that looks real.

”We have a lot of expectations of, if it looks like a person, if it looks like photojournalism footage, then I’m going to interpret it as photojournalism footage,” he said.

“So I’m a little worried about just cautioning everyone ‘don’t believe what you see’ because then we won’t be able to believe real news footage in the same way.”

[On top of concerns about job losses in the industry and a diminution of human creativity and human feelings, Lachman raises the issue of a further reduction of faith in news reporting, this time aided and abetted by people who ought to be journalism’s ally, the film producer, rather than the politician.]

*  *  *  *
ADDENDUM: THE REVIEWS
(5 August 2026)

[When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on 7 June 2026, I promised I’d come back after the movie opened and do a survey of the reviews.  Well, the movie opened at the Tribeca Film Festival as scheduled, on 10 June.  I searched for reviews on the 11th, but was disappointed with the choices, so I decided to wait a few days and see what else came out.

[Well, wouldn’t you know, I immediately got distracted with the next posts, and the search for Dreams of Violets notices lay fallow.  But, now, here wed are, almost two months later, and I went back and found a better sample from which select. 

[The round-up is longer than I anticipated, so I’ve decided to publish them as a separate post on 5 August.  Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll find in “The Reviews of Dreams of Violets.”

[Critics and audiences were polarized.  On platforms like Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd, reviewers evaluated the film on two distinct fronts: as a generative-AI showcase and as a story about the Iranian civilian resistance.

TECHNOLOGY

·   Visionary Attempt: Many reviewers viewed the film as a fascinating snapshot of the current limits and potential of AI filmmaking.  By utilizing generative tools, the London-based Iranian director was able to tell a story about a deadly government crackdown in Tehran from exile, operating on a reported budget of just $2,000 without ever setting foot on a physical set.

·   The “Uncanny Valley”: Many mainstream reviews heavily criticized the visual execution.  Critics pointed out unnatural facial expressions, wooden character movements, generic emotional cues, and jarring editing.  PetaPixel went so far as to call the images “flaccid, vapid attempts at human emotion” and “wooden, hollow facsimiles.”

MOVIE-MAKING

·   Documentary-Esque Vibe: Some critics noted that the fractured, vignette-like structure of AI generation actually mimicked the nature of traumatic memories and disjointed protest footage quite well.

·   Lack of Narrative Weight: Reviewers, including those at Variety and The Wrap, argued that the story suffers from a lack of dramatic development.  Despite the intense real-world subject matter, the film struggles to connect emotionally with the audience, feeling more like a disjointed tech demonstration than a deeply human cinematic drama.

ETHICS

Some audience members strongly criticized the use of AI, labeling the film “soulless” and arguing that a deeply human tragedy like the Iranian resistance deserves real human cinematography and acting.]