Tribeca Festival Sets First Premiere of Fully AI-Generated Film, ‘Dreams of Violets’

The 2026 Tribeca Festival will host the world premiere of "Dreams of Violets," the first fully AI-generated live-action film accepted by a major film festival, on June 10. The 75-minute docudrama, produced by Foundation 0 for about $2,000, depicts the 2022 Iranian protests that left at least 7,000 dead, using AI tools to bypass the director's inability to access Iran, crew, or actors. The premiere marks a milestone for AI in cinema as other festivals like Cannes have banned AI-generated films from official competition.

The 2026 Tribeca Festival has set the world premiere of “Dreams of Violets,” a fully AI https://variety.com/t/ai/ -generated film produced by studio Foundation 0 aimed at showcasing Iranian civilian resistance. The film’s premiere at Tribeca marks the first full-length, live-action film generated by AI to be accepted by a marquee film festival, according to Foundation 0. The film, which will premiere June 10 during the festival’s 25th anniversary, is a 75-minute docudrama inspired by the protests that swept Tehran in January, highlighting five Iranians who meet in a Tehran alley before they’re executed, all witnessed from a window by Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. The clashes reflect the real-world protests between Iranian authorities and civilians, which left at least 7,000 people dead and more than 50,000 people arrested, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency https://www.en-hrana.org/day-50-of-the-protests-intensification-of-security-prosecutions-and-uncertainty-regarding-the-status-of-detainees/ . Director Ash Koosha, who is from Tehran, said in a statement that work on the film began shortly after he read reports on the massacre. He wanted to create a human-focused film, he said, but without access to a crew, actors or Iran itself, he opted for AI. The feature-length film cost about $2,000 to make, according to Foundation 0. Popular on Variety The project took three months — built entirely using tools such as Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, Google’s Gemini and Nanobanana for research and imagery and Foundation 0’s own technology for blocking and frame accuracy, according to the company — all from Koosha’s home in London. The film was “not a technological exercise,” Koosha said, but a bid to “create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.” “I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions,” he said in a statement. “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.” Fountain 0 is a production studio that “blends traditional creative principles with frontier technologies to produce previously impossible movies and TV shows,” according to its website. Film festivals, and Hollywood broadly, have allowed AI-generated films to screen on the periphery of their programming. AI startup Higgsfield AI debuted https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/this-cannes-film-cost-500-000-to-make-400-000-was-ai-compute-costs-a823b08d 95-minute action-adventure film “Hell Grind” at the Cannes Film Festival last week — but through the Marché du Film, the festival’s marketplace for films, rather than as part of the festival’s screening lineup. Cannes organizers banned https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/26/cannes-ai-film-festival-raises-eyebrows-questions-future AI-generated films from the festival’s official competition. The 2026 Tribeca Festival runs June 3-14 in New York. Jurors include the rapper Nas, Oscar-nominated director Mira Nair, actors Tommy Dorfman and Haley Lu Richardson, and New York magazine editor David Haskell.