Turkish Distributor Baska Sinema Boards AI-Generated Feature ‘A Woman Asleep’ for Theatrical Release (EXCLUSIVE)

Turkish arthouse distributor Baska Sinema has acquired domestic theatrical rights to “A Woman Asleep,” an experimental English-language AI feature directed by pioneering artist and filmmaker Vikki Bardot.

Bardot is considered one of the early practitioners of photographic AI art and video art. She delivered a TEDx talk on AI and art in 2023, and her artworks have been exhibited worldwide, including New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Rome and Miami. Her AI short “Dreamt by Another” screened in more than 20 festivals and was recently acquired by Mubi for Turkey.

“A Woman Asleep” is inspired by the 1974 cult French film “The Man Who Sleeps,” directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec. That movie, in turn, was based on Perec’s novel “A Man Asleep.”

In a rare occurrence, Bardot’s 80-minute AI drama that, according to the synopsis, examines contemporary alienation and numbness in today’s world of hyper-connectivity, is set for a spring 2027 release across 20 cities in Turkey via Baska Sinema.

“A Woman Asleep” is produced by pioneering Turkish AI production studio Spongeworthy that is also behind buzzy AI-generated doc “Post Truth,” directed by Alkan Avcıoğlu which made a splash on the festival circuit and also, similarly, got a theatrical release via Baska Sinema in Turkey.

The narration for “A Woman Asleep” is generated using an AI voice clone trained on the director’s own voice. “This choice extends the film’s conceptual framework and dreamlike qualities, allowing the narration to exist in a space between the human and the synthetic, consistent with the world the film portrays,” the promotional materials say, citing the storytelling approaches of Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Chris Marker and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as references.

Edited from a pool of 50,000 individual shots, the experimental film took two years to complete.

“I have been focused on AI filmmaking for 5 years, before it was even a popular subject in cinema,” said Bardot in a statement. “The most interesting use of AI isn’t recreating Hollywood forms. It’s giving independent filmmakers the freedom to make personal, formally ambitious films that might otherwise never get financed,” the director added.

Commented Baska Sinema director Armagan Lale: “What interests us is not the technology itself, but how filmmakers use new tools to expand the expressive possibilities of cinema.”

“A Woman Asleep offers a distinctive, female-centred perspective on a society shaped by technological dependency and emotional disconnection,” he added. “What matters to us is that these tools serve a clear cinematic vision.“