Justine Bateman is not mincing words. In her recent Film Threat interview, the filmmaker and founder of the Credo 23 Film Festival laid out a blunt, passionate case for why AI is not the future of cinema, and why the real fight is bigger than one technology. For Bateman, the problem in film is not just AI. It is an industry that stopped focusing on making great movies years ago, leaving originality, mentorship, and creative risk somewhere on the side of the road while the studios chased algorithms, scale, and safe corporate sludge.
That frustration is exactly what powers Credo 23. Bateman described the festival as a place for filmmakers and audiences who still want the real thing: movies made by human beings without the assistance of AI. One of the goals is to spotlight fresh work that is neither a reboot nor a rehash. In other words, Credo 23 is a refuge for people who still believe film should feel authentic and not corporate.
Bateman’s larger point is that filmmaking constraints are not the enemy of creativity but the fuel for it. Limited budgets, fewer shooting days, tough casting choices, music restrictions, location issues, all the stuff that makes studio executives break out in hives, those are the things Bateman says force artists into inventive solutions. That is the difference between filmmaking and prompt-spitting. Her take is that giving up those struggles for AI shortcuts is not innovation. It is surrender.
She also made a strong case that the collapse of apprenticeship in the film industry is one of the great unforced errors of the past decade. Bateman noted that with less work overall, and even less in Los Angeles, many experienced people are leaving the business, which means younger filmmakers have fewer opportunities to learn from veterans. That focus on mentorship is one of the major additions to this year’s festival. Bateman has brought in guests like Sean Baker, Matthew Weiner, and producer Cassian Elwes as people attendees can actually learn from and interact with, whether the subject is directing, screenwriting, or raising money for an independent feature.
The festival itself sounds built around that same philosophy. Bateman said passes are on sale now, and highlighted a lineup that includes films she and her team selected with brutal standards. If the movies were not good enough, she said they would have shortened the festival rather than pad it out. Imagine that: a programmer who would rather show fewer films than waste the audience’s time.
What comes through most in the interview is that Bateman is not simply anti-AI. She is pro-filmmaking. She is pro-effort, pro-talent, pro-risk, and very much in favor of the messy, difficult, deeply human process of making movies. Credo 23 stands behind the radical notion that audiences still want something alive. That should not be a revolutionary idea, but here we are.
