The 2026 Venice Film Festival is not only waiting for stars: it is also waiting for the shock of an image made differently. In its Venice Open selection, the festival will present Be Brave, Francesco Carrozzini’s documentary about Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel and a central figure in the OTB group. The subject might sound classic: a portrait of a fashion entrepreneur who became a symbol of commercial provocation. But the form changes everything. According to the official Biennale page and information released by Our Films, the film uses artificial intelligence as a narrative, creative and critical tool. In Venice, fashion is therefore not merely dressing the red carpet. It is testing the limits of how images are made.
This arrives at a combustible moment for cinema. Variety noted on August 29 that European festivals are now crossed by political, industrial and aesthetic tensions that go far beyond simple film competition. Venice, like Berlin or Cannes, is no longer a neutral stage. It is a place where artists, brands, producers and platforms publicly negotiate what the word creation still means. With Be Brave, the debate around artificial intelligence enters an even more sensitive area: a film tied to a fashion house, to an image empire and to an entrepreneur whose entire career has consisted of selling irreverence as a global language.
The Right Character for an Unstable Image
Renzo Rosso is not a random choice. Diesel was built against overly polished good taste, against obedient advertising, against denim reduced to a uniform. The brand has always loved provocation: absurd slogans, ironic campaigns, popular energy, and a desire to blur the boundary between luxury, street culture and youth culture. In that context, using artificial intelligence to tell Rosso’s story is not only a technical display. It is almost a logical extension of the subject. A technology that creates disturbance is being used to portray an entrepreneur who turned disturbance into a method.
The Biennale page describes the film as a journey made of interviews, industrial memory and visual experimentation. It also recalls that the documentary begins with Diesel’s official arrival in the United States in 1996, when the Italian brand challenged Levi’s on its own ground. That detail matters. Be Brave is not only about nostalgia for a fashion house. It is about cultural conquest: how a brand born in Italy transformed jeans, the democratic object par excellence, into a vehicle for global storytelling.
Venice: Showcase or Laboratory?
Venice has chosen an interesting position: presenting the film out of competition, in Venice Open. That placement gives it signal value without putting it directly against the works competing for the major awards. It is a cautious but strong way of saying that the festival wants to examine artificial intelligence without immediately applying the same evaluative grammar used for traditional cinema. It can be read as a form of curatorial diplomacy. Venice is not fleeing the subject. It is bringing it into the house, but in a room where its rules can still be discussed.
The issue extends far beyond Be Brave. Festivals know that artificial intelligence divides writers, technicians, actors, rights holders and audiences. Some see it as a tool for previsualization, restoration, editing, translation or archives. Others see it as a threat to jobs, proof, authenticity and the value of human craft. A documentary about Diesel makes it possible to pose that question without reducing it to fear: what happens when artificial intelligence is not hidden inside production, but placed at the center of the contract with the audience?
Fashion Already Understands This Terrain
The reason this film matters to B-EMPIRE is that it connects three economies that often move together: cinema, luxury and technology. Fashion has long understood the power of artificial images. It retouches, styles, choreographs, stages and turns a product into myth. Artificial intelligence is therefore not entering an innocent territory. It is entering an industry that already knows raw reality rarely sells as powerfully as arranged reality.
The difference lies in scale and transparency. A fashion campaign could accept its artifice because the audience knew it was looking at a composition. With artificial intelligence, the artifice runs deeper: it can manufacture memories, recreate eras, mix archives and invention, and give truth the appearance of dream. For a brand like Diesel, that can be a weapon of coherence. For documentary cinema, it raises a difficult question: how far can an image be transformed before the pact of trust is weakened?
The Business of Audacity
Our Films says Be Brave is produced by Our Films, a Mediawan group company, with Our AI, and that the creative direction linked to artificial intelligence is entrusted to Roberto Beragnoli. That organization shows experimentation is no longer marginal tinkering. It becomes a production role, a skill set, a promise that can be sold to festivals, brands and platforms. Artificial intelligence no longer simply accelerates invisible tasks. It can become a market argument.
That is also why Venice matters. Festival recognition can provide a legitimacy that technology demonstrations rarely achieve alone. A video produced with a generative tool circulates quickly, then disappears. A film selected in Venice enters a different conversation: the history of cinema, authorship, criticism and the international market. For producers, the challenge is clear: to turn an unstable innovation into a cultural label.
The B-EMPIRE Verdict
Be Brave will not settle the debate over artificial intelligence in cinema, but it shifts it intelligently. Instead of presenting the technology as either a threat or a miracle, the film appears to use it as a mirror for a figure who has always played with provocation, excess and communication. That is the right entry point: artificial intelligence becomes less a gadget than a question of style, control and responsibility.
The real test will begin with the audience’s gaze. If the film convinces, it will show that an artificially shaped image can still carry strong human intention. If it fails, it will feed the belief that artificial intelligence dilutes the soul of documentary cinema. Either way, Venice will have served its purpose: forcing cinema, fashion and business to look directly at the present. And this time, the present has the face of a pair of jeans, an Italian founder and a machine learning how to dream.