By Glenn Rifkin

“The film is constantly vacillating between the things that give you hope and the things that give you despair.”

Looking Forward, directed by Newton filmmaker Steven Ascher, produced by Ascher and his wife and partner Jeanne Jordan. Screening at the GlobeDocs Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre on October 27 at 11 a.m.

A scene from Looking Forward.

Not unlike the rest of us, Steven Ascher, the award-winning, Newton-based documentary filmmaker, was dramatically shaken by the Covid pandemic. He and his wife and producing partner, Jeanne Jordan, were inspired by that isolation to think about where they belonged in a society where many of the things they had counted on, had believed were enduring, seemed gone, just beyond their reach. It spawned a clash between optimism and pessimism.

An Oscar nominated (for 1996’s Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern), Emmy, and Peabody award-winning director and writer, Ascher started to log his thoughts and feelings and then began to formulate how to share all these meditations in a film. During this period of quiet introspection, he began to experiment with generative AI programs, including one called Stable Diffusion, an early algorithm that produced crude but fascinating, impressionistic still images.

He arranged the disparate pictures and thoughts into chapters — though without a clear blueprint or concept. Unsure if there was anything worth developing, Ascher showed his efforts to Jeanne, his co-producer, who urged him to keep going.

The result is Looking Forward, Ascher’s 12-minute documentary, a personal essay on the state of the world — the climate change crisis, political upheaval, global polarization and violence — and how these various traumas are shaping his view of the future.

Teaming the eerie AI-generated images with Ascher’s narration and a haunting score by his longtime collaborator Sheldon Mirowitz, the short film is admirably ambitious, but packs a subtle punch. In our deeply troubled time, it resonates with sadness, frustration, and wonder.

Ascher spoke to Arts Fuse about how he put Looking Forward together.

AF: Using still AI images to make a film seems like an unusual strategy.

Steven Ascher: I’ve never done an essay film before. If I was going to shoot it the way one would do a traditional film without AI, it would have been enormously complex and take an enormous amount of time. There are scenes you couldn’t possibly stage. A film like this might have been done with animation, but that’s not my wheelhouse.

AF: You say early in the film, “I don’t know how to think about the future.” The images are pretty bleak and dark, there’s a certain grotesqueness to what the AI generated, especially people’s faces. What were you thinking as this came together?

Ascher: The film is constantly weighing optimism and pessimism, even in terms of human nature. I’m someone who believes that people can be absolutely wonderful and I strongly see the good in people. It’s also clear that people can be absolutely horrible to each other. In watching the world today, horrific things are happening to people right across a border that could be two miles away. And those living just two miles away don’t see anything happening, they are just fine. How is it that we can have a world with so much evil and visible pain and death and destruction, while the rest of the world goes on as if that isn’t happening? Or that it really isn’t that important to them? The film is constantly vacillating between the things that give you hope and the things that give you despair.

AF: The film feels very much of the moment.

Filmmaker Steven Ascher. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Steven Ascher: Right. Whether it be climate change or politics or demagoguery, terrible things are happening around us. It is very hard to know how to process that in your world view.

AF: The tenor of the film shifts as you start using real images instead of AI.

Ascher: I think of them as two sides of a coin, in a sense. Another impetus for this film was the explosion of AI and what would that would mean to life. What does it mean to have a machine-processed life? On the other side of that argument is the importance of not letting all of these things destroy our time here. We have to savor life and love and family while trying to make something human out of a world that can be damaging, mechanistic, and artificial. I didn’t see this so much as switching modes as telling the other side of that story using real imagery and thinking about my own life and trying to answer the question: how do I think about the future?

AF: What do you hope people take away from the film? What has been the response so far?

Ascher: It has been really strong. What is most gratifying is that a lot of people identify with it very strongly and tell me it is getting at feelings they have about the world and about their own lives. It resonates for them. A filmmaker I know told me that seeing the juxtaposition of real images with AI made the real imagery have a kind of meaning that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. One person sent a note saying she felt it was a call to action in the form of a poem. I really liked that.

AF: How can people see the film other than at the Boston Globe docs film festival?

Ascher: It will be released widely on the Web later this year. It’s a film about now and it will be released to the public and hopefully seen widely.

Glenn Rifkin is a veteran journalist and author who has covered business for many publications including the New York Times for nearly 35 years. He has written about music, film, theater, food and books for the Arts Fuse. His book Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire was published by McGraw-Hill.