Andrea Iervolino

Andrea Iervolino (born 1987) is an Italian-Canadian film producer and entrepreneur who entered the industry young and has produced dozens of features, including Waiting for the Barbarians, the Academy Award-nominated anthology Tell It Like a Woman, and Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend. He co-founded the international production group AMBI with Monika Bacardi.

In recent years Iervolino has become one of the industry’s most vocal champions of artificial intelligence. He announced The Sweet Idleness, which he describes as the first feature film directed by an AI — a synthetic director he calls FellinAI, named in homage to Federico Fellini — and has openly imagined a future in which automation reshapes how films get made and who gets to make them.

His framing is deliberately additive rather than triumphalist. Iervolino positions AI filmmaking as a parallel track that can bring otherwise-unmakeable projects to life — stories without the budget, access, or backing to exist by conventional means — while the cinema he loves carries on alongside it.

Trailer, backlash, and a February 2026 release

The first teaser for The Sweet Idleness landed on October 1, 2025 — days after the furor over Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” created by Eline Van der Velden, and the industry treated the two as one story. SAG-AFTRA had just declared that AI performers trained on actors’ work without permission threaten livelihoods, and Iervolino’s Instagram announcement drew replies like “shame on you” and “the death of art.” Set in 2135, the film imagines a world where only one percent of humanity still works; it was slated to premiere in February 2026.

Iervolino’s answer to the backlash runs through Actor+, his in-house agency that builds digital likenesses with real, consenting actors for FellinAI to direct — with Iervolino himself as the “human-in-the-loop” supervising the machine’s choices.