Ciclope 2025: 'Ancestra' and the AI of it all.

7 October 2025

Ciclope dipped its toes into generative AI when director Eliza McNitt and John Soat, Design Lead at Google Design Lab, took to the stage to present 'Ancestra', a short film about McNitt's difficult birth.

Ciclope Festival thought it was best to get AI out of the way as soon as possible. At 10:50—sandwiched between the festival curtain raiser and a coffee break—director Eliza McNitt and John Soat, Design Lead at Google Design Lab, took to the stage to present 'Ancestra', a short film about McNitt's difficult birth. She called it "a unique and special opportunity" to explore her genesis, but it was also a flagrant plug for Google's Veo text-to-video model.

The director was keen to point out that "AI did not replace anyone's job", that more than two hundred people worked on it, and it was, er, "not an AI film". Ten weeks and thousands of discarded shots later—who needs water when you're knee-deep in a "shared conceptual sandbox"—'Ancestra' was born, so to speak. Part medical drama, part 'A Brief History of Time' (with some animals from the uncanny valley thrown in for good measure), it's a "technical feat" that clearly means a lot to McNitt.

Yet as soon as you hear the mum ask her unborn daughter "What's wrong with your heart?", the all too familiar doubts about AI rise to the surface—is there heart to films that are generated? Words like "metaphor", "rhythm", and "imagery" are as pleasant as a free cup of espresso (DAVID could smell it through the doors of the auditorium), but talk of "motion-matched video generation" and "mycelial network perception" is harder to swallow.

There was also a strange moment when McNitt said that "filming with children is unethical", hence the use of AI and a doll. This disingenuousness part of a trend by AI enthusiasts who slip a contentious idea into their advocacy and hope that no one notices. For the record, it is not unethical to film with children.

In any case, it's… bold to talk about principles when AI itself is such an ethical grey area, greyer than the fog that covered Berlin this morning. The generated baby was based on photos taken by McNitt's father, to be fair, but it's difficult not to regard 'Ancestra' as a problem child.