The director defends investment in and use of AI-generated storyboards, saying the immediacy of communicating his vision to cast and crew is ‘creatively freeing’

Martin Scorsese’s announcement that he has invested in an AI company and uses the technology to create storyboards has triggered a backlash from fellow members of the film industry.

The New York Times reported that Scorsese had been appointed in 2025 as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, a German-based venture that specialises in text-to-image generative AI.

It should have taken years, but Ash Koosha made a drama about Iran’s anti-government protests in weeks – and now it’s the first AI-made movie to screen at a major film festival. It could transform indie film-making, claims the director

Next week a breakthrough 75-minute drama about the brutal crackdown in Iran on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. “I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Dreams of Violets is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance in an alleyway. How on earth has Koosha managed to pull together a drama about the killings in less than six months?

The answer, it turns out, is by using artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI-generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearances, using people he has known in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he says. “Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.”