September 17, 2026
How AI Makes Concerns About War Visible
When I started I’Mpossible Film Festival, one of the things I was curious about was what people would actually choose to make with AI.
By Nima Akbarpour
1 min read
The festival is focused on human-led AI cinema, especially stories that may otherwise be difficult, unsafe, censored or too expensive to film conventionally.
Now, as submissions are coming in for our first edition, one pattern has started to stand out.
A noticeable number of films and music videos are dealing with war.
They come from very different places, including Ukraine, Iran, the United States and Hong Kong. The stories and styles are different, and I do not want to assume that all of these filmmakers have the same motivation. But it is hard not to notice how often war, destruction, fear and displacement appear.
What interests me is not only the theme itself, but why AI may be helping these filmmakers express it.
War has always been expensive to put on screen.
Destroyed cities, military vehicles, explosions, large crowds and dangerous locations normally require serious budgets, crews and planning. For many independent filmmakers, those images were simply out of reach.
Generative AI changes that.
A filmmaker working alone or with a very small team can now create images of ruined streets, battlefields, historical conflicts or imagined destruction that would previously have required a much larger production.
That does not mean making a good film becomes easy. Story, editing, sound, performance and point of view still matter.
But one important barrier is becoming lower: the ability to visualise an idea.
And I think that matters, especially when the idea comes from a real concern.
AI is not creating these filmmakers' anxiety about war. It is giving them another way to make that anxiety visible.
There is also a tension here.
The same technology that makes destruction easier to represent can also make it visually spectacular very quickly. That raises another question for filmmakers: how do you show war without turning suffering into just another visual style?
I do not have a simple answer to that.
But what I am seeing through I'Mpossible submissions is making me think that one of the most interesting uses of AI in independent cinema may be very practical.
It gives filmmakers access to images they previously could not afford, safely create or physically reach.
And right now, some of them are using that access to talk about one of the oldest and most difficult subjects in cinema: War.