Dreams of Violets

Dreams of Violets is a 2026 Persian-language docudrama feature, listed at 74 or 75 minutes depending on the page, written and directed by Ash Koosha and produced by his brother Pooya Koosha under their AI studio Fountain 0. Every image and character in it is AI-generated. It had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival on 10 June 2026 and can be rented to watch on Fountain 0's own site.

Fountain 0 says it is the first fully AI-generated, feature-length film accepted at a major festival. In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, the brothers said they used proprietary technology and third-party models such as Kling AI for video generation and world modelling, and Fountain 0 elsewhere names Google's Nanobanana for imagery and Gemini for research. They started from a script and blocked each scene as on a traditional film, planning shots and the placement of characters and objects before generating. About 30 minutes in, Ash changed roughly 15 minutes of scenes. Music, sound mix, editing, pacing and colour grading were done by hand. Press reports put the cost at about $2,000 and the schedule at roughly two to three months, figures that differ slightly between outlets, and Koosha says he voiced the roles himself before AI altered the voices.

Koosha, who left Iran in 2009 and lives in exile, has said he lacked access to the locations, crews and people a conventional shoot would need, and presents AI as a practical workaround. He has pushed back on the label, saying "That's why I don't like to say this is an AI film", and described the film as intentional in a way he says typical AI films are not. Letterboxd credits Tom Rogers as executive producer, and Fountain 0 says its next project is a fantasy film using the licensed faces and voices of 10 performers.

The festival listed it under Special Events. Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal defended the choice as a powerful example of AI used as a vehicle for "deeply human storytelling". The announcement trailer went up on YouTube on 27 May 2026 and had about 84,600 views when read on 12 October 2026. Its comments are overwhelmingly critical of the use of AI, and so are most of the top reviews on Letterboxd, many of them from people who say they have not seen it. At the premiere the Q&A praised Koosha for his two or three months of sleepless work, according to the A.V. Club.

Critics were divided or negative. Variety's chief critic found the drama dramatically numbing yet a startling portent of the future, the A.V. Club's critic called it essentially an AI-generated snuff film, while The Guardian asked in a headline whether it is "AI slop – or the future of film-making?". Happy Mag reports that discussion spread across Reddit, with some users criticising Tribeca for programming it and others praising the Koosha brothers for bypassing studio gatekeepers. No award or later festival selection was found.

It matters as a test case. Tribeca's selection made it the first fully AI-generated live-action feature in an official festival programme, and the low cost behind it fed an argument, which The Guardian aired, over whether AI could open filmmaking to independent makers or amount to slop. Because it dramatises real killings, the disagreement is also about whether the technology suits such a subject.