UTAE is an upcoming feature film written and directed by Alessio De Vecchi, co-directed with Michael Laburt and co-written with Tommaso Gallone. It represents a deliberate step into narrative cinema - not as a departure from visual art, but as its natural extension. De Vecchi has spent years building worlds that exist for minutes at a time on stage, rendered in real-time, consumed in the dark, and gone by morning. UTAE is the first of those worlds built to last.
The story is tied to a mysterious AI happening — a fictional event unfolding at the threshold between AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial superintelligence), where the boundary between human cognition and machine cognition begins to dissolve. UTAE is not a film about AI the technology; it is a film about the moment after — when something on the other side of the threshold looks back, and what it sees is us.
The collaboration with Laburt is rooted in a shared conviction that cinema is not a medium you graduate into - it is a medium you arrive at when your visual language outgrows the formats that contained it. De Vecchi's work directing visuals for ANYMA's live productions - from Printworks London to the Sphere in Las Vegas - trained an instinct for narrative pacing, emotional architecture, and the precise calibration of image to sound. UTAE channels all of that into a fixed frame.
The screenplay is co-written by Tommaso Gallone, with cinematography by Luca Esposito. The film is produced by Basement in collaboration with Nishimura Naoya and Morimichi Aoki - a production structure that bridges European creative sensibility with Japanese production discipline. That cross-cultural axis is not incidental; it is embedded in the DNA of the project.
De Vecchi and Laburt share directing credit because the film demanded two perspectives operating as one. This is not a case of divided responsibilities - one handling visuals while the other handles performance, or any other convenient split. Both directors shaped every dimension of the work. The partnership exists because the story required a dialogue between two creative minds that neither could have sustained alone.
For De Vecchi, UTAE is also a form of permanence. His visual work for ANYMA has been seen by millions of people, projected at scales that dwarf traditional cinema, and covered by publications from Variety to Flaunt. Live performance is ephemeral by nature — the visuals exist in the moment and vanish. Film is the opposite commitment: a permanent record, a fixed composition, something that will be watched and re-watched. UTAE is De Vecchi choosing permanence.