I’m thinking about my review of Late Night with the Devil from two years ago, which was not a review at all.I refused to engage with the content of the film because it used generative AI for the interstitial art, which felt ethically weird and broke my immersion in a film that’s meant to evoke found footage from the 70s. But I wasn’t crazy about the execution of that film overall, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised and didn’t have qualms about drawing that line in the sand.Two years later, I’m shocked that generative AI was used for animated portions of Rehearsals for a Revolution, a film I saw at the Philadelphia Film Festival. It won the L'Œil d'or at Cannes this year. It’s the British entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.Rehearsals for a Revolution is an archival footage, anthology documentary in five chapters about five people in the life of the filmmaker, Pegah Ahangarani, and the five forms of resistance they exhibited over the course of about 50 years of Iranian history, from the revolution of 1979 to now.The AI portions (or what I strongly suspect is AI, only corroborated by this Letterboxd user who claims it was confirmed by the filmmaker in a Q&A) are in a chapter about Pegah’s early life and are used to render her own perception of what she was seeing at the time. There’s a few shots of Disney-esque princesses, which young Pegah compared her schoolteacher’s golden hair to. And there’s a scene of her being taken to the principal’s office in which she’s an animated chipmunk and the principal and teachers are green goblins. I think it totals to about 2 minutes of screentime. I initially suspected AI because frankly, the animation looked like shit. But when I saw the goblin-teacher’s fingernails disappear after a cut, I knew.The unfortunate and honest fact of the matter is that it planted a seed of doubt in my mind that I couldn’t shake. How can I be sure that the archival footage used in this film wasn’t tweaked or fabricated entirely?The events themselves weren’t fabricated, to be clear. I am in support of this film ideologically. But the credibility of the film wavers in my mind, even as I try to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.So this doesn’t get a rating. I hope filmmakers understand, sooner rather than later, the impact this has on the integrity of their work.
