“The CGI would have cost millions.” I spent $2,000.’ Is Dreams of Violets AI nonsense – or the future of filmmaking?

NA groundbreaking 75-minute drama about Iran’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next week. It’s called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. “I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But “Dreams of Violets” is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama about a group of strangers caught up in the protests who meet by chance in an alley. How on earth did Koosha manage to put together a drama about the murders in less than six months?

The answer, it turns out, lies in the use of artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearance, using people he knew in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he said…