The First Major AI-Native Documentary Never Filmed Its Subject Once
"Be Brave" premieres at Venice without a single filmed frame of its subject. AI recreated him entirely, and the festival is defending the choice.
"Be Brave," a documentary about Diesel founder Renzo Rosso, premieres at the Venice Film Festival's Out of Competition section starting tomorrow. Director Francesco Carrozzini didn't shoot a single frame of his subject. Every scene featuring Rosso was recreated entirely using AI instead, and Venice's own artistic director introduced it as a genuine creative first for the festival, not a stunt.
Why They Didn't Film Him at All
Carrozzini told Variety the decision started from a practical problem, not an artistic one. Existing archival footage of Rosso was largely television material, functional but lacking the intimate, revealing interview moments a real character portrait needs.
Rather than work around that gap, the production decided to recreate those missing moments from scratch using AI, building a custom image generation pipeline over more than 18 months specifically for the project. The film is also fully scripted, a deliberate structural choice rather than the observational, run-and-gun style typically associated with documentary filmmaking.
Venice's Own Endorsement
Alberto Barbera, Venice's artistic director, introduced "Be Brave" as "the first Italian feature-length documentary almost entirely processed with artificial intelligence."
His framing went further than simple description: "I want to put this film forward as an invitation for everyone to think about how AI as a tool can open up new creative possibilities for filmmakers... It's the role of festivals today to tackle this topic, going beyond the prejudices that seem to dominate the conversation." That's a notably direct statement from the leadership of a top-tier film festival, not hedged language treating AI as a controversial sideshow.
Carrozzini's Actual Position on AI
Carrozzini has been careful to frame the project as deliberate craft rather than a shortcut. He describes AI in the film as something that "can still live within a space of emotion and storytelling," and has stressed that "the human has to come first" throughout the process. Even many of the film's live-action sequences were digitally reworked rather than left untouched, suggesting the AI involvement runs through the entire production rather than being confined to a few obviously synthetic scenes.
Competitive Context
Venice's selection lands amid a broader wave of high-profile AI film projects, Ex Machina's AI-generated series and features, Darren Aronofsky's and Martin Scorsese's various AI partnerships, and Netflix's acquisition of Ben Affleck's AI production company InterPositive among them.
What separates "Be Brave" is the venue and the endorsement: this isn't a straight-to-streaming curiosity or an executive-produced side project, it's an official festival premiere at one of cinema's most prestigious events, with the festival's own leadership actively defending the choice rather than quietly tolerating it.
The Signal in the Noise
A documentary that never films its actual subject is a genuine test of what the word "documentary" can still mean once AI enters the picture. Carrozzini's insistence that human judgment stayed central throughout, script, direction, creative decisions, mirrors a pattern showing up across other serious AI film projects this year: the tools generate material, but a filmmaker's voice and choices still shape what the finished work actually says.
Whether Venice audiences and critics agree that "Be Brave" earns the documentary label, or read it as something closer to a scripted biographical film that leans on AI imagery, is likely to be one of the more genuinely contested conversations to come out of this year's festival.
Does recreating a subject entirely through AI, rather than filming them directly, change whether a project still counts as a documentary to you?
The Details
- Film: "Be Brave," 85-90 minute documentary on Renzo Rosso, founder of Diesel and chairman of OTB Group
- Director: Francesco Carrozzini
- Premiere: Venice Film Festival, Out of Competition section, September 2-12, 2026
- Production time: over 18 months, built on a custom AI image generation pipeline
- Key detail: no footage of Rosso was filmed directly; all scenes featuring him were AI-recreated, and the film is fully scripted
- Festival framing: introduced by artistic director Alberto Barbera as "the first Italian feature-length documentary almost entirely processed with artificial intelligence"
- Produced by: Our Films and Our Ai
