Turkish Distributor Baska Sinema Sets Theatrical Release for AI Feature 'A Woman Asleep'

Turkish arthouse distributor Baska Sinema has acquired domestic theatrical rights to "A Woman Asleep," an experimental English-language feature directed by AI art pioneer Vikki Bardot. The film is set for a spring 2027 release across 20 cities in Turkey.

The 80-minute AI drama examines contemporary alienation and numbness in today's world of hyper-connectivity, according to the synopsis. Its rarity lies not only in its technique but in its distribution: a fully AI-generated experimental feature receiving a theatrical rollout is nearly unheard of.

Bardot ranks among 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 in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Rome and Miami. Her AI short "Dreamt by Another" screened at more than 40 festivals and was recently acquired by Mubi for Turkey.

"A Woman Asleep" draws inspiration from the 1974 cult French film "The Man Who Sleeps," directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, itself based on Perec's novel "A Man Asleep."

The production comes from Spongeworthy, a pioneering Turkish AI studio also behind the buzzy AI-generated documentary "Post Truth," directed by Alkan Avcıoğlu. That film made a splash on the festival circuit and likewise received a theatrical release through Baska Sinema in Turkey — a precedent that evidently encouraged the distributor to double down on AI-generated cinema.

The film's narration uses 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. They cite the storytelling approaches of Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Chris Marker and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as references.

The scale of the undertaking was considerable. The filmmakers edited the experimental feature from a pool of 50,000 individual shots over two years.

Bardot positioned the project as a corrective to assumptions about what AI filmmaking should be. "I have been focused on AI filmmaking for 5 years, before it was even a popular subject in cinema," she said 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.

Baska Sinema director Armagan Lale framed the acquisition in similar terms, stressing artistic intent over technological novelty. "What interests us is not the technology itself, but how filmmakers use new tools to expand the expressive possibilities of cinema," Lale said.

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

The release will test whether Turkish arthouse audiences will turn out for a feature built entirely from synthetic imagery — and whether Bardot's model of formally ambitious, low-budget AI filmmaking can find a sustainable path to cinemas beyond the festival circuit.