A Film Made Without a Camera: Francesco Carrozzini's AI-Built Portrait of Diesel Founder Renzo Rosso Heads to Venice
Director Francesco Carrozzini is bringing an 85-minute documentary about Diesel founder Renzo Rosso to the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and he did not shoot a single frame of his subject. Instead, he used artificial intelligence to recreate Rosso at different stages of his life, making Be Brave one of the first AI-driven feature films to launch from a top-tier festival (Variety).
The film screens out of competition at Venice 83, which runs on the Lido. Festival director Alberto Barbera selected it deliberately. "I want to put this forward as an invitation for everyone to think about how AI as a tool can open up new creative possibilities for filmmakers," Barbera said (Variety).
The idea came from producer Lorenzo Mieli, who wanted to experiment with AI on a film about Rosso. Mieli produces at Rome-based Our Films, a Mediawan company, alongside Mario Gianani and Gabriele Immirzi (Variety). Carrozzini hesitated at first. He had stepped back from the fashion world — his mother, Franca Sozzani, was the late editor of Italian Vogue, and his 2016 documentary Franca: Chaos and Creation screened at Venice — to focus on narrative film and television. He was on the Lido in 2022 with his first feature, The Hanging Sun.
What pushed the AI approach was a practical gap: there simply were not enough good interviews or intimate archival moments of Rosso to build a conventional documentary. Carrozzini spent a year and a half making the film, and the technology shifted so fast during production that work completed at the start had to be redone (Variety).
Be Brave is fully scripted. It uses a documentary device in which Carrozzini pieces together the puzzle of who Rosso is while the subject tries to mislead him. The result blends AI-generated recreations of Rosso at various ages with real talking heads and archive material. Rosso, the founder of Diesel and the OTB Group — a fashion empire spanning multiple brands — is portrayed as a visionary underdog who rose from poverty (WWD; Variety).
Carrozzini is careful about how he frames the technology. He says the film is not a thesis on AI but a reflection on its place in storytelling, and that what matters most is that "the human has to come first." He has also said the work aims to show that AI "can still live within a space of emotion and storytelling" (Variety).
What makes this stand out is the festival's willingness to put an AI-made film on its programme at a moment when the technology divides the industry. Venice is not endorsing the method. It is putting it in front of an audience and asking them to judge for themselves.
For festivalgoers and industry attendees, Be Brave offers a test case: can a film built largely on machine-generated images carry the emotional weight of a human life story? The answer, for now, belongs to whoever sits in the theatre on the Lido.
