EXCLUSIVE: Justine Bateman has been warning about the corrosive realities of generative AI for the creative community long before most people started paying any attention to the rise of the machines. Now the Violet director is putting her SOS on the big screen with a no AI-allowed film festival.
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Set to debut in LA in 2025, the CREDO 23 Film Festival promises to “a filmmaker-first, no-AI event” that is “real, and raw.”
“With studios, streamers, and now film festivals, embracing generative AI, it was time for the CREDO 23 Film Festival,” Bateman told Deadline today of the inspiration and timeliness of the new fest. “It creates a tunnel for human artists through the theft-based, job-replacing AI destruction. The festival honors the incredible human artists who make films, and will financially grant recourses to human filmmakers to continue to do so.”
Those grants will come. from the profits from C23FF, all of them. “We support creativity, not conformity,” the organizer say, adding that AI is “based on stolen work, it only regurgitates the past.”
Running from March 28- 30, 2025 at the American Legion, Post 43, in Hollywood, the C23FF will be accepting submissions from August 1 to Halloween, October 31, 2024. You can submit your AI-free film here . Badges for film fans will go on sale on November 1.
Self-defined as “a collection of film and series professionals that hold filmmaking sacred, and understand their responsibility to preserve the art form,” the CREDO 23 Council includes Bateman, Juliette Lewis, Mad Men boss Matt Weiner, Handmaid’s Tale helmer Reed Morano and Once Upon a Time In Hollywood costume designer Arianne Phillips.
At the core of last year’s Hot Labor Summer AI was also a big part of the now concluded IATSE bargaining and the ongoing Teamsters negotiations this year. In the last 18 months the leaps and bounds in the content scrolling technology has seen AI brought fully into the studio and streamer mainstream as companies seek to cut costs and cut corners.
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Cuts that Bateman raised the alarm over frequently in SAG-AFTRA’s fight with the studios and streamers and the deal they eventually reached.
“I’ve maintained from the very beginning, when I started talking to actors about what would happen, that’s the key to the front door,” Bateman told Deadline’s Katie Campione last November as the SAG-AFTRA contract and its AI provisions awaited ratification (Spoiler Alert: it passed ).
“You can do all these renovations in the house,” Bateman added continuing the real estate analogy. “You can get all these other gains in the contract. But if you don’t get that, if you don’t get control of what they can do without you based on 100 years of performances…you put in a prompt and you get out this Frankenstein amalgamation of performances. I said that if you don’t get that, you’ve given them the front key to the house, because it’s not just the actors. It’s the crew, it’s the drivers, it’s everybody. If you don’t have to shoot an actor, you don’t need a set. You don’t need a crew. You don’t need drivers.”
As the backlash against AI has grown in this year of industry contraction, last month former SAG board member Bateman’s group launched its CREDO 23 VFX stamp to filmmakers could show audience that their work has no AI, minimum CGI and VFX and is union made.
Bateman teased the new festival last week on X/Twitter:
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