The total communications blackout and physical access restrictions inside Iran following the January 2026 protests left exiled filmmaker Ash Koosha unable to shoot a memorial feature on the ground. To bypass those geographical limits, his team turned to artificial intelligence. The resulting project held its June 10 world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, introducing audiences to a 75-minute docudrama constructed on a $2,000 budget.
Working under the production banner Fountain 0 alongside Pooya Koosha, the duo generated the live-action-style feature without physical sets, cameras, or traditional actors. The filmmakers utilized a suite of commercial programs, including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Kling AI, to render the visuals and script the narrative.
Operating in exile since 2009, Ash Koosha noted that recreating the events using traditional CGI would have cost millions, but this new workflow allowed him to bypass traditional gatekeepers entirely. The entire production was completed in two to three months. Because they used no human actors, Ash Koosha voice-acted every role in the film himself and then ran his audio through AI software to simulate different ages and genders for the cast.
The Tribeca screening makes Dreams of Violets the first completely AI-generated live-action-style feature to enter the official programming of a major film festival. The financial implications of the project have caught the attention of traditional studios. Media executive and the film’s executive producer Tom Rogers warned that the Fountain 0 production pipeline demonstrates techniques that could theoretically reduce $200 million Hollywood blockbuster budgets to “close to zero.”
Despite securing major festival distribution, the film still faces hard institutional roadblocks regarding traditional industry accolades. The Academy of Motion Pictures currently enforces guidelines dictating that films eligible for Oscar contention must feature acting and writing performed by human beings, boxing entirely AI-generated projects out of the awards circuit.