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Tribeca Screens First Fully AI-Generated Live-Action Feature

The 75-minute film uses generative models to re-create scenes from Iran’s January protests and its public debut sharpens ethical, labor and distribution questions for the film industry.

Overview

  • The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday as the first feature-length, live-action movie the filmmakers say was entirely produced by artificial intelligence.
  • Writer-director Ash Koosha and his Fountain 0 team built the 74–75 minute project in roughly two months for about $2,000 using tools the production cites by name, including Kling AI for video, Anthropic’s Claude for language work, and Google’s Gemini and Nano Banana for imagery and research.
  • Critics and some audience members gave mixed responses at the screening, noting frequent technical flaws such as unnatural motion, glitching hands and stiff facial expressions that created emotional distance from scenes of political violence.
  • Koosha and his collaborators argued they used AI because exile and censorship blocked conventional filmmaking in Iran and they view the film as a memorial to protesters, and they acknowledged imperfections onstage while confirming the project currently has no formal distribution deal.
  • The premiere has intensified industry debates over consent, representation, job loss and copyright for AI-made work and could prompt calls for clearer festival policies, legal protections for creators and new standards for using real-world testimony in synthetic media.