The continued blurring of the lines between film festivals and tech showcases has been witnessed in Shanghai across the past week, as panels, screenings and assorted displays of where the film industry stands and where it may be headed played out in real time.
The scene was set during an opening press conference for the Shanghai International Film Festival’s (SIFF) main Golden Goblet Awards jury, when actress Xin Zhilei was asked how she had prepared for the role and laughed that she had consulted the Chinese AI app Doubao for all the advice she needed. It was a line that brought the house down, capturing both how rapidly the technology has risen and how ubiquitous its embrace has become in these parts.
China puts the value of its core AI industry at some $174 billion, with film — and the wider umbrella term “content” — taking a decent whack out of that thanks mainly to the growing use of AI in short dramas and animation.
There were a few SIFF initiatives this year that took innovative and insightful approaches to the rise of AI and its impact on cinema. Chief among them was the AI Backlot program — partnered with Hailuo AI (MiniMax) — which paired a traditional filmmaker with one from the AI side of the industry and tasked them with producing an AI short over a month, while recording the whole experience.
Instead of tucking them away to do their work, SIFF converted a vast exhibition room at the Shanghai Film Art Center into a live “open set” studio where — gaming style — the filmmakers could be watched at their consoles as they worked, while huge screens also broadcast their work as it was being developed.
Chinese filmmaker Hou Zuxin (The Italian Recipe) was paired with German AI filmmaker Mark Wachholz, and the two produced the AI-driven short A Message for the Butterfly — a lushly realized philosophical musing on memory that Wachholz described as a “documentary of ideas,” noting that AI is “very good at representing or visualizing abstract ideas.”
“Our entire process is very relaxed,” explained Hou, who admitted to being initially curious about AI in terms of creativity and pure economics. “We were on the same page immediately. I told him I was a traditional filmmaker but I hoped that one day AI could help me create a scene or a small teaser that can let others know what my thoughts are and what my vision is. This work allowed me to make a whole film, and it was an exciting and eye-opening experience, like I entered a whole new world.”
By now a little more traditional, in filmmaking terms, but still charting a course no less innovative, was the SIFF ING program’s mobile filmmaking camp.
Driven by a need to explore “new technologies, new perspectives, and new youth” — and as a quite brilliant way to showcase iPhone filmmaking advances — the camp of 10 young talents was mentored by cinematographer Gao Weizhe (Black Dog), actor Qu Chuxiao (The Wandering Earth) and director Nick Cheuk (Time Still Turns the Pages), who also found time to make their own shorts.
The young filmmakers were handed an iPhone, funding and guidance from those mentors — and they dabbled in everything from sci-fi (Stray Chen’s Till Death) to pure romance (Harry Cai’s Amour).
The influence of the iPhone’s growing reach in filmmaking circles was recently to the fore in Taiwanese director Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl (2025), where it was used with great effect, especially to capture scenes shot in and around a bustling Taipei night market. Gao’s own Boxed Mom showed its use for more intimate settings, with his quite superb and emotionally fraught look at the domestic relationship between an aging woman and her daughter.
“I wanted to use this technology to make something that feels very personal because that’s what these phones are — personal,” said Gao.
And let’s not forget developments in virtual reality (VR) — almost pushed to the position of a forgotten rural relative, what with all the focus these days on AI. But the Chinese government is eyeing the possibilities of a $48 billion market, by this year’s estimates alone.
On the sidelines here in Shanghai there was a SIFF Immersive section that explored VR advances and offered attendees a choice of a live concert performance by Jason Zhang, shot and formatted for VR, and a more immersive experience with the screening of The Crafted Crime Cases, which — headsets secured — offered viewers a chance to engage and even help investigate some of history’s most intriguing murder cases, including those of Lizzie Borden and Hollywood’s infamous Wonderland Murders.
“Virtual reality films are transitioning from a novelty experience to a more scaled production and distribution system, which is a significant benefit for the industry,” explained Peng Qijun of the VR firm Shengshi Wanhua Cultural Technology, who was on hand to introduce the screenings in Shanghai. “These films allow each viewer to experience their own screen, creating a personalized space that offers audiences a new experience of stepping into the movie and exploring the viewing process.”