AI-Generated Iran Protest Film Dreams of Violets to Premiere at Tribeca Festival: Watch the Trailer

The genie is officially out of the bottle. Dreams of Violets, a fully AI-generated film inspired by the January protests in Iran, has been accepted into the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Coming from the AI startup Fountain 0, the movie will make its world premiere on June 10th. Watch the trailer below.

According to a press release, every image and person in Dreams of Violets was AI-generated, but the film is based on “journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts” from “the massacre of Iranian civilians by Iranian government forces in January.”

“Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute docudrama feature inspired by real events from 47 years of Iranian civilian resistance,” reads the official logline. “Through the eyes of five strangers, it brings protest footage to life with raw immediacy. At dawn, as Iranian forces execute wounded protesters, a violent soldier discovers the five hiding in a dead-end alley. Above them, Amir, a child in a wheelchair, watches from a window and decides to act.”

The movie’s creators, brothers Ash and Pooya Koosha, were born in Iran and left the country in 2009. Their production company, Fountain 0, made Dreams of Violets in three months, using Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, Google’s Gemini and Nanobanana for research and imagery, and Fountain 0’s own technology for blocking and frame accuracy. The film is described as “indistinguishable” from a fully human-made independent film.

If you don’t pay close attention, the trailer’s footage almost looks like an ultra-low-budget effort, which it was. In a statement, Fountain 0 Executive Chairman Tom Rogers boasted of “incredibly efficient cost management techniques” which brought the budget down to $2,000.

“I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions,” Ash Koosha said. “I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film. My answer is that the alternative — silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome — is worse… the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”

Koosha also admitted the film will “understandably bring chills down the spine of many in Hollywood,” but argued that “Fountain 0 technology solves for the financial barriers” for independent filmmakers. And though Ash and Pooya expressed concern over the “unknown implications… for the livelihoods of many,” they pointed to purported “new types of jobs” being created with AI-generated film technology.

Meanwhile, Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal touted Dreams of Violets as “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.”

“At this time in history when both artificial intelligence and Iran are central to global conversation, this film offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand,” Rosenthal continued in a statement. “What moved us was not just the technological achievement, but the emotional immediacy and urgency of the story itself.”

Tribeca Festival runs June 3rd through 14th in New York City. It will also premiere a 4K restoration of Daft Punk’s sci-fi film Electroma for its 20th anniversary, and Bruce Springsteen will be honored with the 2026 Harry Belafonte Award.