Venice Doc ‘Be Brave’ Might Be the Most Radical AI Experiment Film Festivals Have Seen Yet

The AI debate in Hollywood has mostly played out in courtrooms, union negotiations, and awards-season hand-wringing, but Venice is about to test something far more direct: an entire feature film built almost entirely out of the technology itself. Italian director Francesco Carrozzini is bringing his latest project to the festival’s out-of-competition lineup this fall, and it’s already generating buzz for reasons that go well beyond its subject matter.

That subject is Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel and chairman of the OTB Group, whose rags-to-riches rise in the fashion world has long made him a compelling documentary candidate. What makes this particular portrait different isn’t the story itself, but the fact that Carrozzini never actually filmed his protagonist at all.

The 85-minute film, titled ‘Be Brave’, recreates Rosso at multiple stages of his life using AI rather than traditional documentary footage, a choice Carrozzini says was born partly out of necessity. Speaking to Variety, the director explained that Rosso’s archival material was thin on genuinely intimate moments, so the team decided to build those scenes from scratch instead of working around the gap.

From there, the project evolved into something more ambitious than a simple workaround. The film is fully scripted, built around the conceit of Carrozzini searching for Rosso, who keeps slipping just out of reach, a structure that eventually became the movie’s central theme rather than just a framing device.

Carrozzini has been careful to draw a line around what the film is actually arguing. He told Variety that ‘Be Brave’ isn’t meant as a broad thesis on artificial intelligence, but as a narrower reflection on how the technology functions within storytelling and entertainment specifically. “The human has to come first,” he said, describing it as the one message he wanted to land clearly by the film’s end.

Behind the polished result was, by Carrozzini’s own account, a genuinely difficult production process. Getting Rosso’s AI-generated likeness to speak convincingly meant matching his voice, appearance, and wardrobe to specific points in his life, and then tackling the far harder problem of replicating believable behavior rather than just accurate visuals. Rome-based production company Our Films, a Mediawan company, backed the project alongside producers Lorenzo Mieli, Mario Gianani and Gabriele Immirzi, with Blackstone also involved in the effort.

Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera has framed the film’s inclusion as a deliberate provocation, positioning it as an invitation for filmmakers to consider how AI might expand creative possibilities rather than simply replace traditional production methods. That framing puts ‘Be Brave’ among the first AI-driven features to premiere at a major international film festival, arriving at a moment when the industry is still sorting out how it feels about the technology.

‘Be Brave’ also marks Carrozzini’s third trip to the Venice Lido. He previously premiered ‘Franca: Chaos and Creation’, his documentary about his late mother and former Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani, and returned in 2022 with his narrative feature debut, ‘The Hanging Sun’, which closed that year’s festival. The rapid pace of AI development has made this latest project a moving target throughout production, with Carrozzini acknowledging that techniques used early in the process were often obsolete by the time later scenes were finished.

Whether ‘Be Brave’ lands as a genuine creative breakthrough or a cautionary tale about AI’s limits in filmmaking will likely depend on how Venice audiences respond when the festival kicks off in September. Either way, it’s set to become one of the most closely watched entries on this year’s slate.

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