Dreams of Violets, $2,000 AI film, premieres at Tribeca in June
A 75-minute fictional dramatization of Iran's 2022 protest crackdown, created entirely with AI-generated people and images, will screen at the Tribeca Festival next month.
Dreams of Violets, a feature-length film made entirely with generative AI, will premiere at the Tribeca Festival in June. The 75-minute dramatization depicts the Iranian government's mass killing of protesters in January 2022, with every frame—characters, backgrounds, motion—generated by AI tools.
The production cost $2,000, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That figure includes compute time for image and video synthesis, but no traditional crew, no actors, no physical sets. The filmmakers used AI to create fictional characters and scenes representing the real-world crackdown that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Festival precedent
Tribeca's decision to screen the film marks one of the first times a major festival has programmed a fully AI-generated narrative feature. The festival has previously included shorts and experimental work that used AI as one tool among many, but Dreams of Violets represents a threshold: a feature-length story with no live-action footage.
The screening will likely draw scrutiny from filmmakers and labor groups who have raised concerns about AI's role in creative industries. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA both negotiated contract language last year to limit AI's use in replacing human performers and writers. A $2,000 feature that bypasses actors and crew entirely is the scenario those negotiations anticipated.
