2026 Edinburgh International Festival Fringe

 

[The Edinburgh Festival began in 1947 as a single official, classical arts event to heal the wounds of war, which accidentally sparked the world's largest open-access performing arts movement.  It was founded by Rudolf Bing (1902-97; Austrian-born British opera impresario who worked in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1950 to 1972) to unite Europe through culture after World War II. 

[The main, official event, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), focuses exclusively on high-profile, curated classical music, opera, theater, and dance.  It established itself as a top-tier destination for new work and hosted the world premières of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949) and Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1954).

[Unlike its open-access counterpart—the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—the main festival deliberately limits its programming.  This carefully handpicked lineup allows the EIF to focus entirely on elite, world-class artistic quality.

[In 2026, marking its modern evolution, the EIF entered a high-profile, three-year co-production partnership with the Holland Festival and France’s Festival d’Avignon, two other international festivals founded in 1947.  The EIF now features 147 individual performances across its month-long run (7-30 August 2026; through 31 August for the Fringe).

[Back in 1947, eight theater groups arrived without an invitation because they were left off the official program.  Refusing to leave, these groups performed on the edges (the “fringe”) of the main event using independent venues. 

[Because the main festival booked the city’s premier theaters, these groups took over whatever small spaces they could find—church halls, a cinema, and even a restaurant.  It was this specific layout in 1947 that prompted a journalist to write that these plays were performing “round the fringe of official Festival drama,” accidentally naming the global movement. 

[Today, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, built entirely on an un-curated, open-access model where anyone with a script and a space can perform.

[The size of the Fringe dwarfs the main official festival, operating as a massive, city-wide takeover.  Currently, the Festival Fringe hosts over 4,100 un-curated shows; over the 25-day run, artists stage 53,884 individual performances.  The lineup features talent arriving from 71 different countries.

[Because the Fringe Society, founded by artists to nurture and uphold the Fringe’s values of inclusivity, experimentation and imagination, maintains a strict non-vetting policy, the festival’s lineup is highly varied.  Stand-up and sketch comedy make up 38.4% of the entire program (1,401 shows).  It serves as the primary global scouting ground for networks like the BBC and Netflix.

[The festival functions as an incubator for raw creativity, boasting 1,748 world premières.  Beyond comedy and theater, the program heavily features contemporary dance, circus acts, cabaret, spoken word, and musicals.]

“SURVIVING EDINBURGH’S MASS CHAOS”
by Helen Shaw

[This review of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe ran in the New York Times on 22 August 2026 (Sec. C: “Arts”).  (It was also posted as “How to Make Sense of 4,000 Edinburgh Shows: Just Soak It All Up” to the Times’ webpage on 20 August 2026.  Helem Shaw reviewed the performances from Edinburgh, Scotland.]

Amid 4,000 fringe shows, discernible trends emerge.

There’s something ridiculous about the name of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“Fringe” implies decoration happening out on a margin, threads on the hem of a larger garment. But if you have ever elbowed your way down a crammed Edinburgh sidewalk in August, past hundreds of posters for stand-up shows and circus spectaculars, accepting promotional fliers from, say, a woman wearing a disco ball on her head — you might wonder what garment could possibly be larger than this.

This year, the Fringe includes over 4,000 productions. I went to a critics’ symposium where I heard writers talk about how impossible it is to discern trends in such a huge population. And yet, somehow, they do. Certainly in the 23 pieces I managed to see, themes emerged. For example, I accidentally saw three shows in one day that featured Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013; British stateswoman; Leader of the Conservative Party: 1975-90; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1979-90; known as the “Iron Lady”]. (I could have just as easily gone to three “Heated Rivalry” spoofs.)

Ostensibly, the Fringe operates on the periphery of the Edinburgh International Festival, an event founded in 1947 to bring the world to the city’s stately sandstone theaters. Despite the Fringe’s exponential (and eclipsing) expansion, that international fest continues. This year, I saw two rather lengthy shows: “Seagull” and “A Trial — after ‘An Enemy of the People,’” both of which ran a full two and a half hours without intermission.

“Seagull” — rendered as “[seagull],” as if for closed captioning — was often wildly thrilling. This Belgian adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s [1860-1904] unrequited-passion drama [written in 1895; first produced in 1896] features a superb cast of both hearing and deaf actors, all communicating in Flemish Sign Language. The production, directed by Stijn Van Opstel [sic: Stijn Van Opstal; Flemish actor and theater director, b. 1976; co-founder of the theater company Olympique Dramatique, presenter of [seagull], is easily the angriest “Seagull” I’ve ever seen, placing at its center the depressive Masja (“Masha”; the explosive Lobke Leirens) and her self-loathing love-object, the neglected writer Konstantin (Yana Wuytjens). In one of Van Opst[a]l’s cleverest gestures, the supertitles sometimes stop translating, and we experience the stinging frustration of incomprehension for ourselves.

[Wuytjens is a female actor, but this was a gender-swapping production, and Konstantin remained a male character.]

In “A Trial,” the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura [b. 1976] plays Thomas Stockmann, the hero of Henrik Ibsen’s [Norwegian; 1828-1906] 1882 “An Enemy of the People,” in which a scientist is reviled for discovering a contaminated water supply. This modern-day agitprop epilogue to Ibsen’s play, devised by the director Christiane Jatahy [b. 1968; the production was from her Paris-based company, Cia. Vértice de Teatro], consists of Stockmann arguing his case to a jury drawn from each night’s audience.

He wants them to declare that his whistle-blowing doesn’t make him an “enemy of the people,” and at first I was impatient with how the verdict seemed to be a foregone conclusion. After an hour, though, I remembered how many real scientists are being vilified, just like Stockmann. “Why don’t we stop this farce?” I kept thinking, right up until that question — and its political ramifications — finally penetrated.

I thought a lot about theatrical duration during my breakneck trip to Scotland. The International Festival’s generous running times give plays time to pivot: to refashion our understanding of a Chekhov classic, or to move from obviousness into persuasion. But almost every show I saw in the Fringe’s protozoic ooze lasted about an hour. Although stand-ups excel in that format, as can song cycles, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that many Fringe plays relied on bathos, since dramatists can draw a character in that time but have little space to develop more complicated emotions than that’s sad.

Perhaps as a result, among the new plays there’s a vogue for characters talking about fashioning a story. That works in rare cases, as in the Emma Howlett’s [British-Irish writer and director, b. 1997] intellectually generous “The Plot” [presented by theatregoose] or in the eerie nightmare story-hour, “As Far as We Know,” by Sam Ward [British theater-maker, writer, and performer; founder of the contemporary theater company YESYESNONO; b. 1994]. It can, though, slide into tweeness.

For instance, in the much-acclaimed but, to my ear, thinly sentimental “Badgers” by Malaika Kegode [British writer, performer, theater-maker, and producer; b. 1993], a podcaster falls into a supernatural mystery. Instead of watching actual scenes, we hear about them from a narrator (Kegode herself) who swoops a magical pen around as if flying a spoon into a toddler’s mouth. She concludes by telling us, cloyingly, that we all have our own stories, and that these are made up of “moments.” Yech.

Clowning, on the other hand, can cut straight to the metaphorical pie-in-the-face. The world doesn’t make linear sense, so why should a show? Simply by painting their noses red, the athletic clowns Xhloe and Natasha [New York City-based absurdist physical theater, clowning, and playwriting duo consisting of Xhloe Rice (b. 1999) and Natasha Roland (b. 1999 or 2000)] can somersault into the middle of the plot of their “Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It” and start acting out an entire small town plagued by a (fake) sasquatch. Their satire becomes a strangely sympathetic portrait of conspiratorial thinking: People would rather believe in cryptids than in their neighbors’ brutality.

Another [British] clown duo, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole of the docu-absurdist Sh!t Theater, made the trenchant “Evita Too,” exploring the true story of Isabel Perón — Juan Perón’s third wife, who became the world’s first female president when he died — as well as the performers’ own fraught relationship with legacy.

[The reference, for those who don’t catch it, is to the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948; English composer and impresario of musical theater) musical Evita, about the life of Eva Perón, (1919-52, Argentine politician, activist, and actress) who served as First Lady of Argentina from June 1946 until her death in 1952. She was the second wife (1945-52) of Juan Perón (1895-1974; Argentine military officer and politician; 29th and 40th President of Argentina: 1946 to his overthrow in 1955, and 1973 until his death in 1974).

[Evita, as she was known, was followed (1961-74) by Isabel Perón (b. 1931; Argentine politician, known as Isabelita) who served as President of Argentina from 1974 to 1976.]

Sixteen years into their collaboration, Mothersole and Biscuit (who spend parts of the show naked and on roller skates) crack jokes about misogyny, often connecting Isabel Perón’s historical erasure — if not her corporate neo-fascism — to aspects of their own experience. For instance, much like Isabelita, the clowns get a lot of unsolicited advice from men. They cheerfully display a cautionary letter from an Andrew Lloyd Webber representative, who seems worried that the show could reflect poorly on his client’s musical “Evita.” (Adorably, the lawyer notes that he assumes that his letter will end up in the show.)

Lloyd Webber’s legal team must have had a busy summer. I also saw the company Flo & Joan’s [British sisters Nicola and Rosie Dempsey] charmingly bonkers “One Man Musical,” which imagines a certain mega-composer of “musicools” [i.e., Webber] trying to win over the youth with a preening solo bio-play.

The wonderfully desultory Ed Easton [British actor, writer, and comedian] ambles around, refusing to do an impression of anyone in particular, probably so he can’t be told to cease and desist. He does, though, issue droll commands while demonstrating maneuvers in “Starlight Express”-style roller skates. He indicates Flo & Joan’s critique of Lloyd Webber’s overweening influence while also warning the front row. “You’re going to need to stop my mass,” he says, rolling toward us.

[Starlight Express is a 1984 musical with music by Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe (b. 1943; British songwriter, lyricist, musician, and broadcaster). It’s about railway trains and the actors perform on roller skates.]

Many Fringe pieces seem to see success itself as villainous, not to say demonic. In the explicit solo show “Roleplay,” Hannah Reilly [Australian comedian and podcaster] blames the lure of podcast superstardom for shaping her hypersexualized persona; in “Ay Am!,” the clown Maya Ricote’s [Mexican/Venezuelan-American telenovela actress turned contemporary clown artist; b. 2000] hilariously exaggerated curves (balloons, basically) have been bestowed on her by a Mephistophelean talent agent, who otherwise keeps her in a cryogenic freezer.

Fame is a shared obsession because, while you’re at the Fringe, you can’t help but wonder what will escape the Fringe. The festival’s crossover hits of the last decades, like “Six: The Musical” [2017; West End, 2019; Broadway, 2021], “Fleabag” [2013; British TV series, 2016-19] and “Baby Reindeer” [2019; British television miniseries, 2024], are hard to recreate. And watching so much theater in such excited company makes your own opinions about what’s successful slalom crazily. Even as I sat laughing in a basement in Edinburgh, I wondered how I’d respond to the same show in a basement in New York.

But I did see two productions that seem ready to thrive outside the Fringe’s peculiar hothouse ecology. One of them, Alex Bechtel’s [New York-based multidisciplinary composer, actor, writer, and music director; b. 1986] “Penelope,” is already many years into its gestation, yet it could almost have been called into existence by this summer’s “The Odyssey” [2026 epic film] discourse. You think a Cyclops is bad? Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trapped, as she says, in a house “full of monsters.”

The stunning Grace McLean [American actress, playwright, composer, and singer; b. 1984] plays — and collaborated in writing — the long-suffering titular role, performing a cycle of songs about her fury at a husband who has left her in a two-decade lurch. McLean, whose voice ripples like bronze under the smith’s hammer, has both a wonderful siren’s shriek and a smoky, torchy growl. (Impressively, the show actually climaxes in a long, silent moment; like Odysseus’s nurse, you’ll know it when you see it.)

I was also utterly swept away by “The Real Kyle McCarren,” another long-developing musical, composed by Andy Roninson [American musical theater composer, lyricist, orchestrator, and music director; b. ca. 1989] and Sean McVerry [Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer; b. 1990], with a book by Roninson. It looks like a band gig, but it functions as a wake: Roninson is grappling with the early death of his childhood friend Kyle, the first guy he ever wrote music with. McVerry, on guitar, plays Kyle’s revenant, and between their excellent rock-inflected songs, there’s plentiful frontman banter.

The real story, though, is the interplay among the band. Playing assorted characters (Kyle’s friend, Kyle’s mother, etc.) are several staggering performers, including the astonishing Vincent Jamal Hooper [American stage and television actor; b. 1994 or 1995], sweet Sarah Coffey [Brooklyn-based actor, musician, vocalist, and comedian; b. 1994], and the powerhouse heartbreaker Jaygee Macapugay [Filipino-American Broadway performer; b. 1974]. They have voices like gods, while Roninson, as he frequently admits, does not. He’s a virtuoso on the keyboard, though, and as the group performs, we see each bandmate lost in laughing awe at the others’ gifts.

I was delighted because they were delighted, and this vicarious pleasure summed up my experience of the Fringe — its true power comes from so many artists watching other artists. The rest of us are welcome, but the makers are their own best audience, and we gather strength from their collected heat and light.

[Helen Shaw is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  She trained as a dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the last few years that it was run by its founder, the playwright-critic Robert Brustein.

[Dramaturgy can often be a bridge to reviewing—the first dramaturg, Gotthold Lessing (1729-81; German philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic), was an embedded critic at the Hamburg National Theater—and it turns out Shaw was learning to be a critic without knowing it.

[Once she moved to New York, she started writing freelance reviews and features in 2003.  Most of her criticism over the next decade and a half appeared in Time Out New York.  Shaw joined New York magazine in 2019, The New Yorker in 2022, the Times in 2026.]

New York Fire Hydrants

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

[New Yorkers looking for ways to beat the heat in the summer often turn to opening city fire hydrants to create impromptu sprinklers.  This has been one longtime tradition.  But is that water safe to swim in—or drink?  And what risks can come with opening a hydrant? 

[Opening hydrants occurs in other major U.S. cities like Philadelphia and Chicago.  New York City, however, stands out because it formally regulates and legalizes the practice.  While other municipalities crack down on and strictly prohibit unauthorized hydrant opening, the Big Apple has institutionalized a way for residents to do it safely.

[The Philadelphia Water and Fire Departments strictly ban recreational hydrant opening, viewing it as a dangerous hazard that drops water pressure for firefighting and risks street or basement flooding.  Instead of issuing spray caps (a policy Philly phased out), the city directs residents to official public pools and city-operated “spraygrounds.”

[Chicago residents in neighborhoods far from Lake Michigan (such as the South and West Sides) still pop hydrants informally during severe heatwaves.  The city, however, aggressively discourages or locks down units due to risks of low water pressure in upper floors and flooded basements, relying on official park district cooling centers and pools rather than sanctioned hydrant attachments.

[Incidentally, Los Angeles doesn’t have a recreational hydrant-opening culture like New York City at all.  While LA suffers from intense summer heatwaves, the city doesn’t offer a spray cap program.  (The only notable hydrant-tampering in LA occurs in high-density encampments, like Skid Row, where individuals sometimes illegally tap hydrants for basic sanitation, drinking water, or bathing.  The city, however, aggressively locks down these units.)

[NY1’s Dean Meminger spoke with New York City officials about the safety concerns surrounding open fire hydrants and whether they want to put a damper on the summertime tradition.]

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

“IS IT SAFE TO COOL OFF UNDER AN OPEN FIRE HYDRANT?”
by Dean Meminger

[Anchor Meminger’s human interest story aired on Spectrum Cable’s NY1 News on 20 August 2026.]

NY1’s Dean Meminger hits the streets to explore how the tradition began, hear from New Yorkers who grew up cooling off in hydrant water, and find out who really controls the city’s hydrants — the city or the people?

CHAPTER 1: INTRO TO NYC’S HYDRANT CULTURE

Dean Meminger, NY1 News: On a hot summer day in the city, you’re guaranteed to see people cooling off in hydrant water. Thousands of gallons of water just splashing on people, keeping them nice and cool when the temperatures are 90 and above.

Now, if you grew up in the city like I did—I’m born and raised here—perhaps you remember cooling off in this water. Thousands of gallons of water just spraying all over everybody.

Now, the city tries to discourage that. They actually give people [MUSIC] the caps to put on the water so that they don’t waste. so much of it. Full blast is dangerous.

Don’t just open the hydrants. It’s illegal to just open them like that. If every hydrant had this [SHOWS A SPRINKLER CAP] on it, we wouldn’t have pressure problems in the buildings.

I’m going to dive into this issue to find out how the tradition started. I’m going to speak to people who are actually turning on the hydrants and those playing in the water to see what they know. I will also speak to city officials to find out what they’re doing to make sure people are doing it safely.

So, now I’m on a mission to find out who controls the hydrants in our city. The city or the people? Let’s go.

So, first, let’s rewind. How did the summer tradition of opening a fire hydrant even begin in the first place?

CHAPTER 2: HISTORY OF OPENING FIRE HYDRANTS

Lilly Tuttle, Museum of the City of New York, Senior Curator for the Collection: I can tell you—kids were doing it in the 1930s—that there was an issue around 1933, of actually [MUSIC] an uprising, sort of a protest because the fire department shut off the water.

[On 9 June 1933, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan (part of Midtown West’s Theatre District), during a brutal heatwave, approximately 400 neighborhood children and teenagers wearing bathing suits, swimming trunks, and improvised underclothes, marched through the streets and used wrenches to crack open neighborhood hydrants, placing sticks in the nozzles to spray the water skyward.

[Temperatures in New York City climbed aggressively into the mid-to-high 90’s Fahrenheit with oppressive humidity, creating suffocating, greenhouse-like conditions inside the city’s un-air-conditioned brick tenements. It was described by contemporary news reports as “stifling” and “stifling heat” across Manhattan.

[NYPD officers marched through the neighborhood with wrenches to systematically shut down the open fireplugs, the neighborhood youth revolted. Outraged at losing their only relief from the sweltering heat, the crowd of kids marched directly to the West 47th Street Police Station to stage a boisterous demonstration against the police crackdown.

[This 1933 protest marked the first time the city’s informal hydrant culture escalated into organized civil defiance, setting off a multi-decade battle between residents seeking cooling and helmet-wearing police officers that ultimately forced NYC to invent the modern “spray cap” system, which arose in the 1950s.]

Historically, not every [MUSIC] New York City neighborhood has had sort of an even distribution of [MUSIC] playgrounds and sort of recreational infrastructure.

And so definitely, the hydrant is kind of a creative workaround.

Meminger: Opening fire hydrants in New York has been a part of its history for a long time. Now let’s see what city residents have to say about it.

CHAPTER 3: WHAT NEW YORKERS THINK OF OPENING HYDRANTS

Man in the Street by a Hydrant: For those that’re not close to the pool or to the beach, this is your beach.

Muslim Woman on Sidewalk (heavy accent): I grew up in the lower east side in Manhattan near Fifth Street. To be a swimming pool day because they are but yeah, we playing the hydrants and now my children are enjoying it

Meminger: How cold or cool is that water?

Little Girl: Really cold and I really like it!

Young Man: You know what we in the city and I feel like—if there’s a way for kids to have fun in a safe manner without having to go somewhere far, let them have [MUSIC] their fun

Another Young Man: People in the heat got to find a way to survive the heat

Meminger: And what do you remember about playing in the hydrant as a kid?

Older Man in a Wheelchair: This [LEANS OVER AND SPLASHES MEMINGER. THEY LAUGH]. 

Meminger: So, this is the situation that city officials are trying to discourage.

[MUSIC] We’re driving across the Bronx and we see this hydrant open. No one’s cooling off. Thousands and thousands of gallons of water just wasted. And as we walk right over here, we actually see the cap in the corner. So, someone took it off maybe to cool off, but they put the cap over here. That water is being wasted.

CHAPTER 4: WHAT THE CITY SAYS ABOUT OPENING HYDRANTS

But what does the FDNY think about open hydrants?

Tim Keenan, FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief, Traditionally, right, we do cool off in the fire hydrants in New York City. Right, that’s been going on for many years. In fact, I’m on the job almost 30 years and we’ve had sprinkler caps for hydrants since I first got on the job.

Okay, but where the problem comes in is if people don’t use the sprinkler caps. If they just turn the hydrant on and they let the water just free-flow in the street, that can pose a problem to us.

New York City’s water grid is a gravity-fed system. primarily a gravity-fed system with water coming down aqueducts from upstate and so there’s no quick way to just turn up the pressure. So if we get a lot of hydrants open in the city, it reduces the water pressure and the volume of water.

The best way to do it is with the sprinkler cap. There’s a lot of advantages if you come to a firehouse. They’re available at every firehouse citywide. We have 200 firehouses in the city. Anyone 18 years or older can come to the firehouse and get a spray cap.

Meminger: Have fun, but be safe.

Keenan: Have fun but be safe, right? We want everybody to enjoy. We want everybody to be cool.

Meminger: After speaking directly to firefighters, people who need to cool off, and seeing the issues with open hydrants, we decided to go directly [MUSIC] to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection or DEP.

Lisa F. Garcia, Commissioner of NYC DEP: I know how much it means to the community. Um, for us in the Bronx, it was like we knew this is part of our summer fun. And what I love about this program of the spray caps is we’re not saying don’t turn on the hydrant.

This is understanding the culture [MUSIC] of summer in New York. So, we want you to be able to turn on that hydrant, but use a spray cap so we’re not [MUSIC] wasting water. The fire department has the right pressure, right? And the community and we . . . the kids can still run around in that sprinkler of water and cool [MUSIC] off.

We’re not saying no to using your hydrant. So, come to us, to the fire department. We want to work with you to make sure you can still enjoy it.

Meminger: When it comes to water coming out of the hydrant . . .?

Garcia: Yeah.

Meminger: . . . is it safe to drink that water if it’s been running for a while?

Garcia: Yes. Yeah. So, the water that’s going to come out of the spray cap is delivered from the same water tunnels that come from the reservoirs all the way upstate. So, we maintain 19 reservoirs starting in the Catskills. So, [MUSIC] think of it like . . . almost like natural spring water from the mountains that’s preserved. So it’s . . . it is clean drinking water.

We make sure to sample it and test it. Make sure that you are enjoying the best drinking water I think in the world.

Meminger: So this was a gadget that in the Bronx they made up [LOOKING AT AN IMPROVISED DEVICE INSTALLED ON A HYDRANT]. They actually did some plumbing and they have their [MUSIC] own cut off valve on it to make it spray. I mean people are coming up with their own concept . . . .

Garcia: Yes, we appreciate the imaginative solutions.

Meminger: So they put a . . . they put a PVC pipe and then ran it up [ANOTHER IMPROVISED SPRAY DEVICE]. So, it’s like a shower.

Garcia: Wow. But that’s kind of like a sprinkler part. The . . . Okay, these folks should be sending [MUSIC], their creative ideas to us so we can figure out is this really reducing the amount of gallons we’re using per minute. And like again, this is [MUSIC] safer because the kids can play on the sidewalk.

Meminger: Yeah. So, maybe we’re very creative.

Garcia: So, maybe we can have like a contest. For now, we want to use the ones that have already been certified and authorized, but we could continue [MUSIC] to think of ways to work with communities. Like, ‘What works for you?’

CHAPTER 5: WHO REALLY CONTROLS THE HYDRANTS

Meminger: Now, with that, who really controls the hydrants?

Lilly Tuttle: The city controls the hydrants, but I think it’s amazing to think [MUSIC] about New Yorkers going out and sort of taking ownership over this piece of infrastructure, particularly on a really hot day.

Man by a Hydrant: Well, the city makes sure the water’s in there, but the people control it.

Man in Wheelchair: I believe the people control it.

Meminger: Why?

Man in Wheelchair: Because it’s too hot!

Young Man: It falls more towards the [MUSIC] people. Like there’s always a method to opening . . . .

Muslim Woman: So the city control the hydrant, but I know there’s some people that they have it. You know how it is. The Bronx it down Bronx.

Meminger: So the city may control the water and fire hydrants, but we New Yorkers know if it’s a hot summer day, we’ll always find a way to stay cool.

Hi, I’m Dean Meminger.

[Born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx, Dean Meminger, Jr., is a prominent American television journalist who serves as an anchor and criminal justice reporter for Spectrum News NY1.  Based in New York City, he has spent nearly 30 years—he joined the NY1 news team in 1997, after starting his broadcast career at BronxNet TV in 1995—covering high-profile crime, policing, and community issues across the five boroughs.

[Meminger’s reporting frequently captures the heart, history, and unique culture of New York City.  His special digging into the multigenerational tradition of opening fire hydrants is a perfect example of his ability to blend local heritage with lighthearted community reporting.]

How Did American English Become Distinctly American?

 

[In the longer version of the conversation transcribed below, News Hour correspondent Judy Woodruff observes, “Language is not something we all spend a lot of time talking about.  We kind of take it for granted—it’s just how we communicate, it’s what we engage in every day.” 

[Then she asks her two interview subjects, “How much is English, is our language part of our identity?”

[Responds Valerie Fridland of the University of Nevada, “Language is a repository of our culture, our identity, and of our knowledge.”  Anne Curzan, University of Michigan, adds, “Language is so powerful.  It is core to our identity . . . .” 

[Curzan continues, “It is also one of our most powerful tools as humans to hurt people and heal, and include and exclude.  It is a very, very powerful part of human society.”

[That’s what this podcast is about at bottom.  It’s why, aside from the fact that I’m fascinated with language (as even casual readers of Rick On Theater will know from the frequent appearances of language-related posts on this blog), that I’m posting the abbreviated version of this transcript.

[(I had contemplated posting the full version of the podcast, but this version, from the regular News Hour broadcast, is only about four minutes long, while the full podcast, a link to which is provided below, is 40 minutes and there’s no online transcript I can use.  I can recommend that anyone interested in this topic give it a listen.)

[As PBS transcripts are hybrid human/machine-made, and can include mistranscriptions occasionally, I’ve edited this one slightly.]

“HOW AMERICAN ENGLISH EVOLVED FROM ITS BRITISH ROOTS”
by Judy Woodruff 

[The segment transcribed below aired on the PBS News Hour of 6 August 2026.  It’s posted on the website for Channel 13 (WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City).]

How did American English become so distinctly American? On her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast, Judy Woodruff sat down with linguists Anne Curzan and Valerie Fridland. They look at how Americans from the very beginning reshaped the English language by changing pronunciations and spellings, creating new words and evolving dialects.

[In Pursuit of Happiness with Judy Woodruff is a limited six-episode series of podcasts, aired in the summer of 2026 as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. Woodruff explores the stories behind the milestones of American history and looks at some of the culture, places, and ideas that have defined us.]

GEOFF BENNETT [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Finally, tonight: How did American English become so distinctly American?

AMNA NAWAZ [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Judy Woodruff explores that question and others in this week’s “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast with two linguists, Anne Curzan [b. ca. 1970] and Valerie Fridland [b. ca. 1969].

JUDY WOODRUFF: I want to ask the two of you to take us back to that period and even before, Anne, and remind us what was it about the English language at the time of the Declaration, and even before, that was – it was beginning to be different from British, or was it?

Was it all sounding British?

ANNE CURZAN, Linguist, University of Michigan: It’s such a great question.

And I think that, when we look at the language of 1776, it can look really familiar because we can read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and understand them.

And so sometimes I will hear, well, English really hasn’t changed since then.

And I say, oh, yes, it has.

And you can find all these things in the Declaration of Independence, for example, like a ‘hath’ instead of a ‘has.’

And that’s – there’s a reason when you study the history of English for that, or there’s a reason that the spelling actually still looks British in the Declaration of Independence, because we had not yet had this American reform of spelling, which we can talk about.

So I’m going to let Valerie talk a little bit about sort of the sounds of the language in terms of what was happening in the United States as English had been brought to North America and where – and it’s really important for people to remember how many languages were already being spoken in North America.

So you have hundreds of Native American languages, along with French and Dutch and Spanish, all of these languages being spoken in the U.S. as English arrives, and that’s really important for understanding what happens to English as different settlers from different parts of England and then Scotland and Ireland come to the United States.

So, with that, Valerie, I have set you up . . .

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes.

ANNE CURZAN: . . . to talk a little bit more about the sound.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It is astonishing to hear you say hundreds of Native American languages.

But fill this out for us, Valerie.

How were we sounding back then?

VALERIE FRIDLAND, Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Nevada, Reno: I get asked a lot, what would we have sounded like at the time of the revolution?

[Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by and used differently within any given social group.]

Would we have still sounded British?

That’s actually a question that people want to know a lot.

And there are – it’s – obviously, we didn’t have iPhones back then.

It would have been super helpful, but we did have people that wrote more like they spoke.

So we do have some misspellings, particularly in the colonial period, that give us hints as to how people sounded.

We also had, as Anne referenced, a period of spelling reform following the revolution [late 1780s-1828] that was both part of this simplified spelling movement, which was English doesn’t look like how it sounds, and can we make that less complicated?

Noah Webster [1758-1843; American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author] was part of that.

So was Benjamin Franklin [1706-90; a Founding Father of the United States; American polymath; a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence; first U.S. Postmaster General: 1775-76].

But, also, can we make American English different from British English in part by changing the way it is spelled?

So someone like Benjamin Franklin is very helpful for telling us how people sounded at that era because he actually made a phonetic alphabet . . .

VALERIE FRIDLAND: . . . to represent things as they were spoken and wrote that way, until he kind of gave it up, realizing that no one else was going to jump on his bandwagon.

But there were three main periods in how we sounded, and one would have been the very early colonial period, where it would have been very British for the British settlers, but also you had, as Anne referenced, a lot of other settlers.

But the basic answer is, yes, at the time of the revolution, it probably would have sounded more British than American to us.

There probably wasn’t that big of a difference between the way that a lot of Southern British people spoke in the way they did in, for example, Philadelphia or Boston at that time.

But it would have sounded very different from both modern British speech and modern American speech, because many of the vowels were in flux at the time, and some of the consonant differences that we have now, like the way we flap the T to make it more D-like in words like ‘water’ or ‘bottle,’ would not have yet happened.

So it would have been quite different from speech in either place today.

AMNA NAWAZ: And you can watch this full conversation and all episodes of “Pursuit of Happiness” on our YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.

*  *  *  *
“HOW POP CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
ARE CHANGING HOW PEOPLE TALK”

[The segment transcribed above, “How American English evolved from its British roots,” aired on Thursday, 6 August.  On the following Monday, the 10th, News Hour broadcast another small excerpt from the sixth podcast in Woodruff’s In Pursuit of Happiness series.  I decided to append it to my post, even though it’s little inside-baseball and likely to be of less interest to someone who’s not into languages or, more specifically, linguistics. 

[(It will probably surprise no one who’s read more than a couple of ROT posts that I took a course in linguistics in college.  Paid off in spades for me, too.  But that story’s irrelevant here, though I’ve told it on the blog before (see “Dodging Vietnam” in “Short Takes IV” [22 February 2013] or “Berlin Memoir, Part 1” [16 December 2016]).]

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, over the past few weeks, our Judy Woodruff has been speaking to a host of experts about the country’s 250th anniversary for her “In Pursuit of Happiness” podcast.

That includes conversations about the role satire, national parks, and music have played in our history, as well as the latest episode looking at how American English has evolved.

As it turns out, there’s more than one way that the English language reveals a lot about the way we speak.

VALERIE FRIDLAND: I think a really accessible example of how these kind of intrinsic tendencies we have towards change is in the way that we pronounce ‘butter.’

So, if you’re a British – southern British English speaker, a standard Southern British English speaker, you will say something like but-ta.

(LAUGHTER)

VALERIE FRIDLAND: If you’re an American, you will say BUD-der.

And there’s a natural tendency in language when you have an unstressed syllable because it doesn’t get as much attention and love, for things to reduce, for sounds to reduce.

And so in British English, especially southern British English, you drop the R. But in American English, we kept the R. So we didn’t do that to reduce.

Instead, we reduced with the T. But they start to be imbued with social meaning, so that if you say but-ta, you’re standard southern British.

If you say BUD-der, you’re American.

And so you see a difference between social status in Britain, where it’s not geographic distance, but it’s social distance.

And then you see geographic distance that separated people, leading to the difference between the but-ta and the BUD-der pronunciation.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You know, I’m listening to the two of you.

I have so many, so many other questions, and I’m thinking about how much Americans move around now.

You may be born in the North, but you move to the South, and vice versa, born in the East, move to the West.

Of course, media, movies, television, radio, listening to other voices, what kinds of – how has all that, and especially the media, the presence of the media, begun to change, or has it changed, or is it changing how people talk?

ANNE CURZAN: There are the changes and things that people really notice.

So, new slang comes out and everybody wants to talk about ‘six, seven’ or ‘rizz’ or what – these sorts of things.

But one of the things that I study is the more subtle changes that are still happening that tend to go below the radar.

So they’re the sorts of vowel changes that I was talking about.

But, for example, I think some people have noticed that the word ‘shall’ is not healthy.

It is dying out of the language.

What many people have not noticed is that the word ‘must,’ in the sense of obligation, like ‘I must run errands’ – and you can you can hear I do it very seriously, ‘I must run errands.’

Because what I would tend to say is, ‘I have to run errands’ or ‘I need to run errands.’

JUDY WOODRUFF: Or ‘I need to run errands.’

ANNE CURZAN: So ‘have to’ and ‘need to’ are replacing ‘must’ in this sense of obligation.

These – if you hang out with young people, as Fridland does as well, that ‘on accident’ is coming into the language, and ‘by accident’ is moving out of the language.

Like, we’re getting a prepositional shift there.

GEOFF BENNETT: All six episodes of “In Pursuit of Happiness” are out now.

You can watch them on our PBS News YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.

Subway Newsstand Art Project

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”   

[I’ve posted several reports on art in the New York City subways; see, for instance, “Tom Otterness & Life Underground” (27 April 2011), “A Helluva Town, Part 2” (18 August 2011), and “Can Art Be A Crime?” (9 July 2025).

[The article below is a little different.  The art installation here is sanctioned, but dynamic—it changes regularly—it’s multifarious, and it’s housed in a disused newsstand on a train platform.  The rest you’ll read for yourself.  Oh, and it’s called the W4 Newsstand Project (because it’s at the West 4th Street station on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village for the Brooklyn-bound B, D, F and M trains).]

“A SUBWAY DIVERSION THAT AIMS TO DELIGHT”
by Winnie Hu 

[This article ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on 2 August 2026; it’s on the paper’s website as “A Newsstand That Aims to Delight N.Y.C. Subway Riders,” dated 28 July 2026.]

Whimsy and freebies at a vacant newsstand in a West Village station.

Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.

These specialty items for straphangers, which they may not have even realized they need, or want, will be available for free starting this weekend [1-2 August] at a former newsstand inside the West 4th Street station in Manhattan.

The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers — or console them on a bad day — and make their commutes just a little better in the nation’s largest subway system.

It is the latest creation of Al Mullen, 37, a comedian and writer known for his humorous and upbeat takes on the transit world. The newsstand “snowballed” from his free zine, Public Transport Magazine, which he started in 2022 from his Brooklyn apartment and leaves on trains and in stations for riders to discover.

“Everyone’s on the subway,” Mr. Mullen said while fixing up the newsstand on a recent afternoon. “It’s a place where I can meet all kinds of people and see if they’ll be delighted.”

Mr. Mullen partnered with Art on the Ave NYC, a nonprofit that displays art in vacant storefronts, and the David Prize, a philanthropic initiative of the Walentas Foundation [aka: the Walentas Family Foundation; a New York-based private grantmaking organization founded in 2013 that supports civic institutions, the arts, public spaces, and education], to secure a one-year license for the shuttered newsstand from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Then, Mr. Mullen enlisted the help of his friends and fellow transit enthusiasts to transform it into a place where busy New Yorkers would actually want to stop. Edward Steed, a cartoonist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, designed a whimsical mural of trains, buses and people to wrap around the newsstand. Comedians, writers and artists are creating travel guides to the city’s 472 subway stations, which will be handed out at the newsstand.

Mr. Mullen also plans to offer live entertainment, including puppet shows that will run between train arrivals and departures. He is installing a photo booth with a subway pole that commuters can grab to find out “their inner train line.” The picture will show a colored circle around them, which corresponds to a particular subway line and reveals their “train aura.”

Even in its unfinished state, the newsstand on the downtown platform for the B, D, F and M trains has buzzed with activity. Riders have come over to ask directions to their trains. A group of teenagers on scooters zipped behind the counter and made themselves at home, pretending to hawk Newport cigarettes.

The other day, five big round clocks were behind the counter, all displaying the same exact time. Below each clock was a yellow sticky note with the name of one of the city’s five boroughs scrawled in red.

Markus Kusano, 35, a software engineer, stopped to tell Mr. Mullen how much he liked the clocks.

“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Kusano said afterward. “It’s kind of a New York or nowhere kind of thing — that’s all the time you need.”

Mr. Mullen grew up in the coastal town of Scituate, Mass., and later studied film at Occidental College in [Los Angeles,] California. He arrived in New York City in 2011 and worked as a film and video editor. In his free time, he wrote and performed stand-up comedy.

But by 2019, Mr. Mullen was ready for a change. While reporting for jury duty one day, he looked around at all the different people in a Brooklyn courthouse and realized how small his own world was. “I wanted to reach out to people in some way,” he said. “I realized the closest thing to jury duty was the subway.”

So Mr. Mullen made the subway his stage. He created Public Transport Magazine on a home printer and distributed it with guerrilla-style drops on trains. It looked like a school project but was packed with a slew of talented comedians, writers, cartoonists and illustrators, including Jack Handey, an author and former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and David Cross, an actor and comedian.

As it gained a following, he met Erika Augustine, the executive director of the David Prize, in 2024. He applied for the prize, which awards a total of $1 million annually to five New Yorkers who are working to make the city a better place. Though Mr. Mullen did not win, he made an impression.

“His love for the transit system, I think, is so uniquely New York,” Ms. Augustine said, adding that Mr. Mullen has inspired other straphangers to look past the usual gripes about train delays and rats.

Last year, Mr. Mullen reached out to Ms. Augustine with his idea for a transit-focused newsstand. She connected him with Barbara Anderson, the executive director of Art on the Ave NYC and a 2025 finalist for the David Prize.

Ms. Anderson’s group has organized art exhibits in 106 vacant retail spaces around the city since 2020. Last year, the group converted a newsstand in the West 81st Street station in Manhattan into a sound booth [named Sound Booth] where riders can drop by to sing, play the piano, D.J. and catch live performances.

On a Saturday in June, Mr. Mullen held up the keys to the newsstand for the first time outside the West 4th Street station. “It feels like I’m holding the smallest trophy,” he said, before heading down the stairs to see what he had gotten himself into.

A few minutes later, he unlocked the newsstand to find Us Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazines from 2016 still sitting on the shelves and an unplugged Coca-Cola refrigerator in a corner. There was graffiti on several display cases and a thick coating of grime over everything.

“I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, a lot of dirt and no rats that I can see,” he said.

Mr. Mullen returned with cleaning supplies and friends to scrub the newsstand. They found a quarter and placed it on the counter. A man ran up, grabbed the quarter and jumped onto a train. “It was a heist,” Mr. Mullen said. “He hopped on a getaway train.”

The former newsstand was licensed rent-free through an M.T.A. program [Vacant Unit Activation Program] started in 2023 to activate former retail spaces in the subway with public art exhibits. Currently, there are 17 sites, including the newsstand-turned-sound-booth and another former retail unit that became a bodega for dinosaurs [Rex’s Dino Store] at the Grand Army Plaza station in Brooklyn.

Mr. Mullen received $10,000 in initial funding from the David Prize to develop and open his newsstand. He spent $4,200 on the mural, which included getting it made on vinyl. He plans to pay $100 each to other contributing artists and writers, including those creating the station guides.

Mr. Mullen, who works as a writer for a game show app, has not paid himself. He said he saw the newsstand as a space where he could collaborate with more people. “The New York thing is being in company with people, being in community,” he said. “And this is definitely an extension.”

Mr. Mullen and his friends will take turns staffing the newsstand from Friday to Sunday [Gothamist says 1-4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday]. He hopes to raise more money to keep the newsstand running for the next year.

Lily Crandall, 28, a textile artist, volunteered to make the trading cards of subway workers and even has a personal connection — her great-grandfather was a construction worker on the 8th Avenue line. “I love all of his ideas,” she said of Mr. Mullen. “They’re really fun to be a part of.”

The other day, Harris Alterman, 34, and Dave Ross, 43, both comedians, were taking measurements at the newsstand. In June, they had made a video of themselves putting up fake (and temporary) tech ads in Brooklyn subway stations to spoof the real ads that they said were annoying and ugly [see We put up fake tech ads and We put more fake tech ads].

After their video went viral, Mr. Ross posted on social media asking if anyone had access to a space in the subway. Mr. Mullen replied, “Weirdly I do.” Now, the newsstand will host a one-day installation of their fake tech ads on August 8.

“I love how much art and music is in the city — and how much isn’t in the zeitgeist but the city supports it anyway,” Mr. Ross said. “There’s a little scene for everything if you can find it.”

[You know from above that Al Mullen is originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, which is in the northwest corner of Plymouth County on Massachusetts Bay.  (Plymouth County is northwest of Barnstable County, which is Cape Cod.)  He went to college in Los Angeles and came to New York in 2011, when he was about 22.  Here, Mullen works as a freelance film and video editor and writes and performs stand-up comedy.

[Brooklyn-based, Mullen is heavily engaged in New York’s alternative comedy and live performance scenes.  He’s best known for his work with the sketch and performance group Channel 101 NY.

[His work explores the absurdities of daily life and corporate structures.  His satirical prose has been featured across prominent humor platforms, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency (a Patreon page), The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.

[Beyond his solo writing, Mullen focuses heavily on collaborative and live performance formats.  With Max and Al, he performs alongside comedian Max Brand as half of this live musical-comedy duo.  Mullen manages the New York chapter of Channel 101, a monthly non-profit short film festival where creators submit short, episodic video pilots to be voted on by a live audience.  

[His comedic work and digital projects have earned him industry opportunities with the largest and most prestigious stand-up comedy festival in the world, Just For Laughs (Montreal, Canada), and the once wildly popular live, interactive game show app HQ Trivia.

[Winnie Hu is a New York Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.  She writes about demographics, immigration, public spaces, and socioeconomic trends that shape the urban landscape and help explain how people live, work, and move around the city. 

[She’s lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades and has written stories about nearly every aspect of urban life, including transportation, crowding, education, and city and state politics.  Hu joined the Times in 1999, having previously worked as a reporter for the Pensacola News Journal in Pensacola, Florida, and briefly for the Dallas Morning News.]

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.]