MiR

Los Angeles

A short film on the moral gray of AI: a single conversation between Elena, a celebrated founder whose elder-care AI harmed the people it soothed, and Joanne, the journalist who championed her and now holds her accountable.

Project Details

After years of pouring into other people's creativity as a film and doc producer, I've decided to write and direct my first short. More on me and my accolades here if you fancy.

This project was born out of losing my dad this past January and reflecting deeply on a phrase he repeated often: "As long as you are following your bliss, that's all that matters." It had been a long time since I asked myself whether I was following mine, so this film is me searching for that.

And when I reflected on what's tugging at me besides my toddler, the answer is AI. Folks in creative communities, and especially in Hollywood, have been polarized by it, afraid of it, and after I completed the Blue Dot course on AI safety and governance, my world was cracked open. Even though I considered myself highly engaged and informed, it was still only the tip of the iceberg.

The rapid speed at which things are progressing concerns me. It is not about good or bad, it's about the reality that AI is here and we have a responsibility to pay attention, to learn, and to choose how we engage with it.

MiR was born out of that contemplation. It's a contained meditation on the moral gray around AI. It's an opportunity to use story and film to to pose questions that invites the audience to consider for themselves.

So, as a producer and former executive working in Hollywood for almost 20 years, this is not my first rodeo. I have a ton of goodwill--a free camera from Panavision, free location, talented department heads lending their time, and discounted gear and services. Yet, I still need to raise about 25K to cover some hard costs (gear, food, permits, SAG-AFTRA payments, and post).

Here is a fundraising deck I made that includes names and short bios of some of the incredible cast and crew already attached.

The output of this funding is the short itself. I'll submit it to festivals, which are always a nice to have, but I'm more interested in putting the short on YouTube, curating community screenings, and engaging in a dialogue with the audience.

Theory of Impact

A film can't align a model or write policy. What it can do is start a conversation, and I think that's where the real leverage is.

The trajectory of AI is set by people and institutions, and those people act inside the stories available to them about what they're building. Right now many people, especially outside of tech, seem to be stuck in the binary: AI is all good or it's all bad. But it's neither, and the gap between those two stories is where the actual risk lives.

The people building this technology aren't heroes or villains. They're capable, (mostly) well-meaning people making systems they privately suspect could do real harm, and building them anyway. That's a harder, truer story than either the hype or the doom, and almost no one is telling it.

This isn't a subject I picked up to make a film. I've written about it on my Substack, attended AI conferences, made reels, and taken a course on AI safety and governance. I think about it a lot. I believe we have a responsibility to pay attention, to learn, and to choose how we engage with this technology rather than letting it happen to us. MiR is how I'm choosing to engage.

Stories are the best medium I know for holding this kind of nuance, because they give an audience a safe distance to sit inside it. You can watch Elena optimize for something that sounds good, cause harm, and still recognize yourself in her, without being told what to conclude. The film doesn't make her a monster and it doesn't let her off the hook. It just lets you feel two things that are hard to feel in the abstract: that good intentions and a wrong objective still do damage, and that everyone who cheered the technology on shares a little of the weight.

People

Carolina Groppa

Team Member

Funding Details

Start Date: Jul 1, 2026
End Date: -
Expected Duration: 3 months
Funding Raised to Date: -
Annual Budget: -
Monthly Burn Rate: -
Current Runway: -
Funding Goal: -
Funding Stage: -
Fiscal Sponsor: Working with NewFilmmakersLA as a fiscal sponsor

Grants Received– no grants recorded

Add grant

Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$25,000

Ideal

$50,000

How the money will be spent

The minimum investment is just shy of 25K; please see the detailed breakdown here. It buys me a 2 day non union shoot in Los Angeles and allows me to pay crew 250/day for their time. It caps most of the department heads at 500/each even though there's so much prep that goes into a two day shoot. In fact, sometimes shorts are harder than features because there's no ROI for investors/donors. The investment is actually made in the filmmaker, in their potential. It's a vote of confidence that the stories they want to tell matter.

There's weeks, sometimes months of work, to then just shoot two days. Whereas feature films can also have weeks or months of prep, but you then shoot for 20+ days and there's a real financial upside to investors should the film do well.

Anything over $25,000 would go to post--there's a specific VFX/AI shot that I would be able to do with extra funds, as well as hire a sound designer and composer. Items that I can do without, but it would be excellent the have. Then, anything outside of that goes towards festival submission fees, festival travel, and marketing.

Discussion

No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.