He spent early 2025 dominating the Oscars like no one in history.
This year Anora director Sean Baker has another mission on his mind: counteracting Gen AI in filmmaking.
Baker will be one of several speakers at Justine Bateman‘s No-AI Credo 23 Film Festival, which will kick off March 27 at the American Legion, Post 43 in Hollywood. Bateman tells The Hollywood Reporter the director will screen his 2012 intergenerational-friendship drama Starlet and talk both about how he made it and infuses humanity into all his filmmaking.
Also joining the lineup for similar discussions involving past work and the future of entertainment are Gus Van Sant and Matthew Weiner — solidifying the list of filmmakers who aren’t just releasing statements about AI but seeking to build a grassroots movement questioning it.
“I love when people who are really intelligent about something love to talk about it,” she tells THR. “This way, it’s like ‘you have no reason [as a filmmaker] to use AI. We’ll tell you how to do it.’”
This will be the second edition of the festival and comes with a litany of sponsors who all hold a stake in human-led work, including Kodak, live-events theatrical distributor Fathom, Tablet Magazine, The Teamsters and, most pointedly, Custom Sync Slates, which has a particular interest in keeping physical productions going.
The edition will screen films that all, as Bateman put it, include lots of handmade craft. All profits she says will be pooled and given out to filmmakers.
Bateman’s motivation, she says, came from a need she perceived in the industry.
“I just went ‘where are the new filmmakers going to come from who have new ideas that aren’t just making films that are auditions to direct content?’” she said, citing deals other festivals have made with AI companies (Google recently said it was giving $2 million to the Sundance Institute to educate filmmakers in AI, for instance). “My programmers and I will look at a submission sometimes and say ‘check this out, this is such a fresh way to look at something’ and then we realize it’s a world premiere! Other festivals wouldn’t take it. And it’s like, ‘are we being punked?’ I just wanted to give a place to filmmakers like that.”
Bateman founded Credo 23 around the same time as the writers and actor strikes, both of which centered AI as a main concern. She hoped to use it to maintain momentum human as opposed to digitally generated labor. (The Credo 23 stamp certifies that no Generative AI was used in a film.) The organization was a forerunner of sorts to the Daniel Kwan-founded Creators Coalition on AI.
Bateman’s festival comes at a moment when Gen AI is starting to engulf Hollywood and creative work, as Seedance videos featuring Hollywood celebs go viral, Sora is gaining a foothold via Disney’s deal with OpenAI and Super Bowl spots fully incorporate the tech.
Credo 23 has continued to expand and now includes among its “council members” director-DP Reed Morano, actress Juliette Lewis and costume designer Arianne Phillips in addition to Bateman and Weiner. The filmmaker-actress says she hopes to continue shedding light on the encroaching use of AI and slow its progression into artist-led spaces.
“Technology is a component. The problem is it overruns everything,” she said. “I like salt but I don’t put it on everything I eat. And on my car. And on my furniture.”
“We can’t allow ourselves to jump the shark like this,” she added.
