On the Venice red carpet, Renzo Rosso arrived multiplied. Five lookalikes of the founder of Diesel and OTB Group preceded the screening of Be Brave, the documentary by Francesco Carrozzini dedicated to the Venetian entrepreneur and presented out of competition at the Mostra del Cinema di Venezia. The stunt recalls an episode from 1998: when receiving the Advertiser of the Year award at Cannes Lions, Rosso symbolically took the stage through four collaborators wearing masks of his face.
That stunt, consistent with Diesel's communication tradition, introduces a project far less linear than a filmed biography, however. Running 85 minutes, Be Brave is presented as a film created entirely with artificial intelligence after more than 18 months of work. And that description should be taken literally, at least in the authors' stated intentions: the people interviewed to reconstruct Rosso's story—including family, friends, collaborators, and fashion figures—do not necessarily appear in a conventional documentary form.
Among the names associated with the film are John Galliano and Glenn Martens, along with people who worked alongside Rosso. Their interviews underwent an AI-based treatment. It is here that the film introduces its most delicate element: it does not use the technology merely to animate an archive, build visual transitions, or make the editing flow better, but intervenes in the very material that sustains the pact of trust with the viewer in a documentary—the testimony and image of the speaker.
A film that also stages its own artifice
During the press conference preceding the premiere, Rosso said that artificial intelligence informed every element of the work, including the sequences where he appears himself. He even claimed, in his usual ironic tone, that not a single frame portraying him had actually been shot. This is no mere production detail: it compels a different view of the entire narrative.
Traditional documentary preserves a plurality of tools — contemporary footage, archival materials, reconstructions, voice-overs — but typically keeps the boundaries between these registers recognizable. In Be Brave, that boundary becomes part of the work's language. The question is therefore not only which images were generated, altered, or synthesized, but to what extent the viewer is enabled to distinguish them from a recorded interview or a scene that actually occurred.
The available information does not detail which models were used, nor does it explain to what extent the interviewees' audiovisual content was modified compared to the original recordings. It is therefore incorrect to infer that the statements attributed to Galliano, Martens, or the other participants were fabricated. The verifiable fact is narrower: their interviews were processed with AI, and the work describes itself as entirely created using this technology. These two points are enough to require a critical approach, but they do not justify conflating visual processing, voice synthesis, and content fabrication.
From the Diesel language to a new audiovisual medium
The choice does not come out of nowhere. Rosso built Diesel in part through campaigns capable of using provocation, satire, and ambiguity as drivers of recognition. The OTB group, which he founded, controls brands such as Diesel, Maison Margiela, Marni, Jil Sander, and Viktor&Rolf: a constellation in which creative identity and the ability to produce imagery matter as much as the product itself.
A documentary about Rosso made with generative techniques can therefore be read as an extension of that approach: the founder is not simply celebrated or observed, but becomes a manipulable, replicable figure, almost a mask. The doppelgängers in Venezia translate this idea into physical form. The film, instead, brings it into the realm of the digital image, where the replica no longer needs a covered face or a presence on set.
Carrozzini is no stranger to hybrid formats. The director, son of former Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, helmed Franca: Chaos and Creation, an intimate portrait dedicated to his mother, and the environmentally themed virtual reality project X-ray Fashion. With Be Brave, however, he takes a different step: AI is not presented merely as a production aid or an isolated effect, but as the declared infrastructure of the entire film.
Why transparency matters more than the effect
In fiction filmmaking, image manipulation is a founding premise. In documentary, however, formal freedom coexists with a precise responsibility toward facts, the subjects portrayed, and the audience. The use of AI does not automatically make a documentary work less legitimate, nor does it prevent an author from reworking real-world material. Yet it does shift the burden of clarity, especially when the techniques employed can simulate the presence, expressions, and words of recognizable individuals.
For a biographical film, this distinction carries concrete consequences. Viewers must be able to tell whether they are watching actual footage, a reenactment, an archival animation, or a synthetic scene built from multiple sources. The difference is not bureaucratic: it influences how credibility is assigned to a memory, a statement, and even a silence. In the case of a subject like Rosso, whose story is intertwined with a brand and a group that remain active, it also concerns the relationship between corporate self-portrait and editorial work.
Fashion is already well acquainted with virtual bodies, digital campaigns, and imagery constructed to challenge the concept of authenticity. A documentary distributed and discussed within the cinematic circuit, however, takes that debate beyond advertising photography. The risk is not merely aesthetic. Without proper labeling, an audience might interpret a generated sequence as documentary proof; with clear disclosure, the same sequence can be read for what it is: a narrative choice—perhaps a powerful one—yet distinct from an authentic record.
Be Brave thus finds itself on still-unstable ground, where no shared language yet exists to precisely indicate the role of AI. The end credits, director's notes, on-screen captions, and press materials become part of the viewing experience, not secondary accessories. They serve to clarify which voices were recorded, which images were drawn from archives, and which portions were digitally constructed or transformed.
The precedent of interest to the creative industry
The affair is of interest to fashion not because it proves that artificial intelligence can replace a film set. That is the most superficial level of the discussion. Instead, the case of Be Brave shows how companies and their founders can use generative tools to control, expand, or heighten the spectacle of their identity archives. When the subject being portrayed is at the helm of a luxury group, the form of the narrative helps define their public legacy.
Carrozzini's film can only be fully assessed through viewing and understanding the methods by which each sequence was produced. For now, its merit lies in exposing a tension that will increasingly run through fashion, cinema, and corporate communication: AI can create new expressive possibilities, but it does not eliminate the need to know what one is watching. In Venice, Rosso chose to turn this ambiguity into part of the staging. The industry's response will depend on its ability not to leave it at just that.
