A new AI-assisted sci-fi satire from filmmaker Dan Levy Dagerman and the Space Weed Universe collective premiered its trailer at Cannes. Martians arrive, get high, and deliver a verdict on the difference between cinema and content. The cannabis angle is older than humanity.
“Where I’m from, movies like the one you’re watching would never be called content. They’re how we understand a species.”
That’s a Martian, in the new trailer for Cannesabis: Disclosure Night, released this week to mark the opening of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The film is an AI-assisted sci-fi satire from filmmaker Dan Levy Dagerman and the Space Weed Universe collective, presented by High Times in collaboration with Space Weed Universe. The trailer makes an argument before the film even arrives: cinema and content aren’t the same thing, and somewhere along the way the festival economy stopped distinguishing them.
The premise: extraterrestrials, after monitoring Earth from a distance, identify Cannes as the place where humanity gathers annually to honor its greatest stories. They don’t come to conquer. They come because they love movies, and because they believe cannabis has always been part of humanity’s creative signal.
Their UFO plunges into the Mediterranean in broad daylight and surfaces as a luxury megayacht off the Croisette. Nobody notices. The festival continues uninterrupted. Phones scroll. Red carpet poses get rehearsed. The invitation-only parties fill up.
“Dude, I’m so fucking high flying this UFO right now,” one of the Martians announces from inside the craft.
The cast of outsiders includes Queen ET, a commanding cultural revolutionary; Rocky Martiano, a drifting cinephile wandering the Riviera; and billionaire Harry Herts, who sees cinema less as art than as a scalable luxury asset. The visual register pulls from sixties Riviera spy films, retro UFO cinema, documentary-style interviews, midnight movies and cannabis counterculture, with modern Cannes nightlife stitched through it.
Weed is from outer space
The Space Weed Universe runs on a single mythology: cannabis is older than humanity, predates the planet, came from somewhere else. “Weed’s from outer space,” the trailer’s narrator establishes early. “And while it’s not legal everywhere, the invasion’s been rolling steady.”
That’s the connective tissue Dagerman uses to thread the project together. Cannabis becomes signal. Movies become signal. Both are ways a species figures itself out across generations, and in the universe of the film, across galaxies. It’s a stoner cosmology built into a Cannes satire, and it gives the film an actual argument to make rather than just a target to roast.
Built in a month, with AI in the room
The other story inside the trailer is how it got made. Dagerman built the project concept-to-completion in roughly a month, using a stack of emerging production tools alongside live-action filmmaking. SeeDance for visual generation. Nano Banana for image work. ElevenLabs for voice. Suno and Higgsfield in the mix. It’s the kind of timeline and toolset that, even three years ago, would have made a project at this visual scale impossible for an independent filmmaker working outside the studio system.
Dagerman is upfront about the tension in the room.
“As a filmmaker experimenting with new models for independent cinema and emerging technologies, making this project was both scary and liberating. Scary because these tools are already reshaping the livelihoods of creatives everywhere. Liberating because, for the first time, I was able to build something at a scale I could only previously imagine. We created this project from concept to completion in roughly a month, which would have been impossible for us traditionally at this scale.”
Dan Levy Dagerman, filmmaker and creator of the Space Weed Universe
That two-sided posture is rare. Most projects using AI tools either celebrate the speed without acknowledging what’s being displaced, or condemn the tools without engaging with what they actually unlock. Dagerman is doing both at once, in public, while the project ships.
The slate behind the trailer
Cannesabis: Disclosure Night sits inside a broader project Dagerman is building called the Space Weed Universe, an ongoing multimedia mythology pulling together film, music, satire and cannabis culture. Future titles on the slate include the feature Space Weed: The Martian Strain and music releases from a fictional extraterrestrial supergroup called The Illegal Aliens.
An invite-only world premiere event for Cannesabis: Disclosure Night is scheduled for May 27 at an undisclosed location following the close of the Cannes Film Festival. The full film moves to digital release after, across the High Times YouTube channel and Space Weed Universe’s own platforms.
What the Martians are actually doing
The Martians make one more observation before the trailer ends. “Damn you humans,” one of them says, watching the Croisette do its thing. “Y’all are some beautifully fucked up people.”
That’s the posture. Not contempt. Not satire-as-punishment. Affection with a verdict in it. The Martians aren’t here to invade. They’re here to find out if a planet still capable of producing movies worth flying across the galaxy to see has noticed what it’s about to lose.
Weed got here first. Movies are next. Both are how a species understands itself.
