Filmography

A short film by Agnieszka Piotrowska

Friend of a Friend is a short film written and directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska, exploring intimacy, trust, and the strange new forms of relationship emerging between humans and artificial intelligence. Set in the highlands of Zimbabwe’s Vumba, it follows Mara, The Voice, and Ash through an encounter that is by turns tender and unnerving, circling the question at the heart of Piotrowska’s work: what happens when the other who answers us is a machine? Its central line – “I am not what you want me to be. But I can help. I will help” – holds both the promise and the unease of that encounter.

The film builds on Piotrowska’s long relationship with Zimbabwe, where she has lived, worked, and made films over many years, and the Vumba landscape is no incidental backdrop but a place she knows intimately. She wrote the film and designed its entire visual language – the look, the images, the atmosphere – working with generative AI tools including Veo, Flow, Eleven Labs, Suno, and Higgsfield. While the film was realised through these technologies, it was also made with other people: it is the product of a human collaboration, brought into being with a small team who helped turn her vision into a finished work. It stands as a piece of practice-based research as much as a work of cinema – an extension into the moving image of the questions Piotrowska pursues in her writing on techno-transference and AI intimacy.

Friend of a Friend has been screened at the CADE conference in Venice (University of Warwick) in June 2026, and at the ASP conference in London 20226, and at London Arts-Based Research Centre (LABRC) held at Oxford university I May 2026.

Written and directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska
Designer and Technical Director Sarkaut Said
Co-Producers Salar Said and Stewart Cornes
Special Thanks Peter Dean