Turkish studio Spongeworthy's AI-generated feature "A Woman Asleep" has been picked for the main competition of the 36th FilmFestival Cottbus in Germany, according to Türkiye Today's report of 7 October 2026. The outlet calls it the first AI-generated feature to compete in the main section of an established international festival, a claim it makes itself and that nothing else we read confirms.
“What remains underestimated is the sheer potential these tools offer for independent cinema and auteur-driven storytelling.”
Vikki Bardot, director, to Variety · yahoo.com ↗
The film is the directorial debut of artist and filmmaker Vikki Bardot, whose legal name is Gizem Avcioglu. It runs 80 minutes in English and was co-written and co-produced with Alkan Avcioglu, her partner at Spongeworthy. Bardot trained and customised the image models behind the visuals herself, and the narration is an AI clone of her own voice, so the synthetic narrator and the filmmaker are the same person. The finished cut was assembled from roughly 50,000 individual shots over two years of production, with the whole picture built from AI-generated imagery.
The script is semi-autobiographical and draws on Georges Perec's 1967 novel about a man who withdraws from life, which was filmed in 1974. Variety knows that adaptation under a different English title, but both outlets are describing the same work, and the director's name is spelled differently across them too. Festival director Bernd Buder reads the finished film as a study of people who are constantly informed yet deeply alienated by hyper-connected life.
Still from the film: a woman sits cross-legged on a chair between two glowing floor lamps, looking down at her phone against a teal wall
Image: Türkiye Today
Variety first revealed the project in February 2026 with an exclusive trailer, as Spongeworthy prepared to pitch it to buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin. Its promotional material cites Resnais, Antonioni, Marker and Apichatpong as reference points and describes the cloned voice as sitting between human and synthetic. Bardot has said AI coverage keeps circling Hollywood, budgets and clickbait arguments, while the tools' use for independent, auteur-driven work gets far less attention. She also gave a TEDx talk on AI and art in 2023.
The studio has form with AI features: its documentary "Post Truth" played the Warsaw Film Festival, opened in Turkish cinemas and competed at Fantasporto. Bardot's AI short "Dreamt by Another" reached more than 20 festivals and was bought by Mubi for Turkey, and she has spoken on AI filmmaking at the Red Sea film festival, a track record that precedes this selection. One search snippet puts the Cottbus edition at 3 to 8 November, though that date is unconfirmed.
Image from the film's trailer: a woman in silhouette looks at her phone in a pink haze, with blurred figures around her
Image: Variety (via Yahoo Entertainment)
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