Be Brave, directed by Francesco Carrozzini, premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival as a 90-minute portrait of Renzo Rosso. AI was used throughout the film, including to reconstruct parts of Rosso’s childhood where no footage or photographs existed, rework archival material and reshape filmed interviews. Carrozzini has said not a single frame of Rosso himself was shot specifically for the documentary, even though real interviews with people including Anna Wintour and John Galliano were filmed. The production spent more than a year building its own AI workflow while keeping the creative decisions with the director and filmmaking team.
The most interesting part is what AI lets documentary do when the archive runs out. Rosso described seeing himself as a child speaking in scenes that had never been filmed as deeply emotional. That moves the technology beyond restoration or visual effects and into interpretation. The filmmaker is no longer restricted to showing only what survived. Memory, gaps and subjective experience can become visual material too, provided the audience understands they are being reconstructed rather than presented as historical footage.
