The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical

Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets – one of the first films created entirely with generative AI, and Tribeca’s first AI film – I had one serious fear: what if it was good? What if, somehow, the director had figured out a way to transcend the AI slop valley and produce real art?

It’s a good reminder that, as we say in AA meetings, fear isn’t facts. As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art. It is also a cynical cash-grab, built on the bodies of the dead, but we will get to that later. How this movie was selected for an allegedly prestigious film festival is a story that an actual journalist will have to uncover and tell. I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time.

Dreams of Violets is about the January 2026 protests in Tehran against the Iranian regime, and the subsequent mass slaughter of the protestors. Over 6,000 were killed. If you are going to see Dreams of Violets – which you should not – I urge you to read up on these events before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes. Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers. There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point). If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting. As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.

Characters come and go without explanation. Most of the robot cast ends up in an alley at the same time, but it is not clear how any of them got there, or why they stay there. The film entirely lacks narrative logic, making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by. After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.

And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express. I went into Dreams of Violets metaphorically blind, not knowing what it would be about, but it’s too bad I didn’t also go in literally blind, because this movie looks terrible. Director Ash Koosha went for realism, but the technology is nowhere close to capable of that, and so everyone has an unsettling, soulless affect. There is not one eye in this movie that has any spark of life to it. I have seen cologne commercials with more passion.

It doesn’t help that at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI – which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!). Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense.  When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles. More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen. When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.

Interestingly, any individual shot rarely lasts more than a few seconds, possibly due to token costs. While some directors can make this aesthetic work, here, it just makes everything more unpleasant. The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again – it feels like half the movie is composed of third-person behind-the-back follows. Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details. Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices – all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”

If the subject matter wasn’t so tragic, this movie might be good for a laugh. It is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game. A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand. A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out. Someone is shot – there is no bullet wound. Guns sometimes have flares, and sometimes do not, including the same gun in the same scene. At one point, a woman carefully watches a detailed video about how to wrap a bandage – then simply sticks the bandage on without wrapping it. A woman who appears to be around 80 years old has the voice of a bubbly 20-something. Subtitles are misspelled. Some are also laughably mistranslated from Persian – “How can we live from distance?” is one I wrote down. How on earth did a human never check the subtitles?

It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause. When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped. The vibe was funereal. Finally, someone in front forced a half-hearted applause from parts of the audience, but all of us knew the disaster we just watched. The seats to my right were empty, the couple previously in them having left in the middle. The elderly Iranian man to my left muttered, “Stupid movie!” (One would think an Iranian expat in America would be the target audience here.) Everything about the experience was depressing, and I was off my anti-depressants for unrelated reasons so it was legitimately also dangerous for me.

When director Koosha came out to speak, he claimed to detest “90% of AI media,” but was forced to use the technology because he was an Iranian exile without access to the nation or its people. He echoed to the crowd what he told the Hollywood Reporter: “I would have preferred to make this film with a crew, with actors, with the dignity of a full production. That was not available to me.” It’s a good story – AI can bring hidden parts of the world to life, and shed light on injustice. It’s also not the full story.

Koosha is a long-time AI proponent with a financial interest in pushing the tech. As per the Hollywood Reporter, he is a founder of “Claigrid, a cloud AI personalization company with former NBC Cable president Tom Rogers.” According to Koosha’s Medium, Claigrid can make you a “Clai,” a “permanently living AI representation of you trained on how you think, talk, create, respond, work, solve, sell, and serve.” (Emphasis in original.) Koosha was on the AI bandwagon long before most: way back in 2018, to promote an album (yes he’s also a musician) he made in part with AI, he gave an interview to Fader calling himself a “software humanist,” and claiming, “If we merge with machines more, we will be more connected.” In 2019, he co-founded Auxuman, a business that “builds AI-based characters and licenses them for entertainment, branding or live performances.”

None of this was mentioned during the Dreams of Violets screening – not by Koosha, and not by Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca CEO, who introduced the film and echoed Koosha’s claims that the film “could not have been made through conventional means.” It seems relevant that Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people. He’s teamed up an NBC exec to sell AI. Come on!

Dreams of Violets is a bad, nay, a terrible film, yes. But it is more than that: it’s a cynical marketing device for generative AI. Koosha clearly believed that if he played up his Iranian heritage and connected it to an honest-to-God tragedy, he could sidestep some of the criticisms of his AI slop. Tribeca Film Festival fell for it. It doesn’t mean anyone else has to.

Dreams of Violets (2026)
Directed by Ash Koosha
74 minutes