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NLast week, a 75-minute drama about Iran’s brutal crackdown on government dissidents in January premiered at New York’s Tribeca film festival. It is called Violets dream and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. “I would say 80% of it is real life,” says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Violets Dream is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance on the street. How on earth has Koosha managed to produce a murder drama in less than six months?
The answer, it turns out, is the use of artificial intelligence. Every image and scene in Violets Dream is created by AI. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their looks, using people he already knew as references. It would be very dangerous to label the residents Iranhe says. “For security reasons, it would not be safe for the characters to match someone else.”
Where Dreams of Violets breaks new ground is that it is the first AI live action film to be accepted at a major film festival. It’s part of the gathering: the last month the AI took action Hell Grinding shown at Cannes – although not officially selected. A show of all AI movies called Where Robots Grow it was already released in the year 2024. Violets Dream, however, appears to be the first AI film to be technically reliable and complex – not that the use of AI has made things easier, says Koosha. “A lot of traditional festivals don’t want to touch AI. They don’t even want to talk about it. What I’ve noticed is that nobody wants to be the first.”
Koosha is talking to me in a cafe near the Guardian offices in Cross Cross. Born in Iran, he has lived in London for almost 20 years. His career began in Tehran playing in bands and theaters, and he was imprisoned for two weeks in a maximum security prison in Iran for organizing a music festival (“We were playing Arctic Monkeys covers”). After moving to London, he continued to make music. He is a tech entrepreneur, co-founder of an AI startup called Claigrid with his brother Pooya. In 2018, they created an AI singer named Jonah who wrote and sang his own songs. “Back then it was super sci-fi.” He has also launched a studio, Fountain 0, to create AI-powered films.
What he has never done, says Koosha, is politics. That changed in January this yearwhen he saw the footage on his social media feed from Iran, before the internet was blacked out. “For 72 hours, we saw the most horrific events. Some estimates put the death toll at over 30,000.”
Something inside him exploded. “That made me political. That’s where I drew the line. I thought: you know what, I’m going to make the first film about this. It’s time to use technology to keep something alive.” It took him two and a half months to make the film, working evenings at home while continuing his day job as CEO of Claigrid.
The script was not created by AI, but they used the chatbot Claude to improve the language and organize its thoughts. The art of working with AI, he says, is that every time the filmmaker can change their ideas, take the plot in a different way: “You just open another part. You don’t have to worry about rewriting. You multiply your ideas until something reaches the right place.” He rewrote the script and edited the film without using AI.
For his next AI video project, Koosha plans to create characters using real people. “Because now you can register real faces.” Does this mean that the actor is not participating in the film after selling their character? He can speak clearly, and he participates in the financial aspects of the film. I think it’s going to be a whole new world of opportunity for people, especially licensing faces and images.
What about drama, I ask? The 20-year-old Rada-trained actor can argue that he brings more to a film than just a face. “That’s a very valid point, and I think there are issues that I won’t let AI touch, that we still have to do in a theatrical way.” Movies that can be made with AI, he says, “impossible movies, a movie that needs a budget of $300m, and it doesn’t happen in this world.”
Koosha says that Violets Dream would be “100% impossible” to bring to the screen in a conventional way. “If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions. I spent less than $2,000.” They also point to difficulties in raising capital and pre-production. “It will take maybe a year or two to get it done. The idea of making films quickly is something I’m very interested in.”
He also sees a role for AI in making films that look like big studio productions at a fraction of the cost – removing barriers for independent filmmakers. “Indie filmmakers’ ideas are often more innovative and creative than mainstream filmmakers. In my opinion, most of the stories that are told with $100m should be told through the eyes of indie filmmakers.”
AI could democratize the industry, he argues. “I’m thinking about the next one Jodorowsky,” he says, referring to the psychedelic Chilean filmmaker. I think the new space will be different from the old space. And these people will start doing interesting things.”
Critics of AI-generated film argue that it is soulless. But Hollywood directors from Steven Soderbergh to Darren Aronofsky are starting to get involved with AI. Last week, the leader of Jurassic World Rebirth and Rogue One Gareth Edwards explained the invention of AI as a “smart” tool for filmmakers, even Guillermo del Toro said he would “die” rather than use it.
Koosha says he usually doesn’t like AI movies. “Right now, I hate anything made by AI. It disgusts me. I don’t want to look at it. It gives me a headache.” He doesn’t trust other people in the place anymore. “They want to get people used to garbage. I’m somewhere in the middle and try to be a voice of reason. I used AI. I’m an artist. I tried not to use it randomly.” He added: “I’m not selling AI, I’m just using it as a storytelling tool.”
Koosha’s voice did all the roles for Dreams of Violets and then used AI to change them – to make one sound like a woman in her 20s, one like an adult. Some AI filmmakers are using voice actors: “Each team will create their own method,” he says.
Will audiences buy AI characters, I ask? Koosha thinks so. “I’ll give you a silly example. Do you watch Rick and Morty? Sometimes I get really emotional when Rick is sad. But Rick isn’t there. We want Rick to be there because we feel the same way. Pixar movies make me cry.”
Koosha believes that jobs will be created at Fountain 0. “There are many new areas, which are not really known. I guarantee that this company will create at least 200 jobs that did not exist.
The lightning speed of AI in filmmaking means that no one knows how it will disrupt filmmaking. I ask Koosha what he thinks the industry will look like in 10 years: “Well, I don’t think Christopher Nolan will make another $300m movie. Writing a $200m movie to $300m won’t make sense anymore.” He paints a similar picture of the growth of mini-studios: “Every filmmaker will be a studio.” Producers will be working on newly created projects and sharing the profits. “So, I see that in the next 10 years there will be a revolution in finance, hopefully in a positive way. AI will be the catalyst for that revolution.”
