BRAINSTARE

BRAINSTARE is a 137-minute feature film, dated 2025, from Dikenga Films. Steve Balderson directed it from a screenplay by Dr. Joseph Suglia, and Balderson and Jimmy Cohen edited it. Its makers call it the first "live-action" feature realised entirely by AI yet written, directed and edited by humans. It is free to watch on YouTube, and also sold on Vimeo On Demand and streamed on the Relay app, which FilmInk says it reaches through the FilmHub aggregator.

According to FilmInk, every image, performance and frame was generated by AI, along with the sound design, music and voices, while the concept, script, direction and edit stayed human. Balderson chose not to record his own voice or hire voice actors. He says he prepared it like a live shoot, with months of storyboards, blocking, lighting and pacing plans, then built a library of AI "actors", locations and aesthetic rules and prompted each shot for performance, lensing, movement and emotional tone. Keeping characters and sets consistent over hundreds of shots was the main logistical problem. He also says the models blocked many harmless words and concepts, so he rewrote prompts to get scenes on screen as written. No source names the AI tools. Dikenga's page credits the performers Greta Nilsen (Sheba) and Hugo Steinmann (the Invigilator).

Balderson is a Kansas-born independent filmmaker with more than 20 features made by traditional methods, including Firecracker (2005), which a press release says received a Special Jury Award from Roger Ebert, and Sex Love Venice (2024). Suglia first wrote the story as a play, which the makers say reached the screen with every word spoken. Balderson says the technology was woven into the story rather than used as decoration, and calls the film a test of execution rather than of ideology.

A press release distributed in January 2026 said the film was publicly available worldwide online as of 26 January 2026; the film's YouTube upload is dated 1 January 2026. The full-film upload on Balderson's channel had about 2.58 million views and a TikTok trailer about 204,600 views when read on 6 October 2026. Dikenga's page lists coverage from YomiTime, FilmInk and AI Times Korea, and says Film Threat's Alan Ng interviewed Balderson.

Reviews are mixed. A reviewer at 366 Weird Movies found the AI visuals acceptable, with an uncanny, rotoscope-like quality, and the audio workable, but called the pacing a serious problem in act one and the script repetitive. He saw the potential for a Black Mirror-style story but found the execution underwhelming. Balderson says he has met pushback, which he compares with early resistance to digital video and streaming. Dikenga's page lists no awards.

The press release and Dikenga's page present BRAINSTARE as evidence that AI-generated feature films have moved from prediction to reality, and 366 Weird Movies frames it as another attempt at an AI-made film with a human-written script after Incorporeal Man (2025). These claims come mostly from the film's own promoters. Balderson argues that AI will benefit independent filmmakers first by lowering costs once tied to studios.