Jia Zhang-ke at Cannes: "With AI, You Lose the Collective Soul of Filmmaking"

Jia Zhang-ke presented "Torino Shadow" in the official selection at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, a 32 minute short that meditates on cinema through shadow puppetry and the parallel architectures of Turin and Taishan. In a Variety interview at Cannes, he gave the clearest statement yet from a major Asian director on what AI removes from filmmaking, arguing that the technology reduces collaboration to its smallest possible form.

"Just You and the Engineer"

"With AI, it is just you and the engineer", Jia told Variety. "Two people, with all the imaginative limits that entails".

For Jia, that pairing is the problem. Traditional filmmaking at its best is a convergence of many contributors at a single moment: a director, a cinematographer, actors, crew, and the specific conditions of a real place and time. Jia draws on Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's concept of "starry hours" to describe those rare junctures when collective human effort produces something no individual could have reached alone. AI assisted work, he argues, removes the conditions that make those moments possible.

What AI Can Do Well

Jia sees genuine potential in what AI can produce that conventional production cannot. "Using AI we can discover 100 kinds of plants or flowers that don't exist on Earth", he told Variety, pointing to impossible visualization as the technology's real creative opening.

Earlier in 2026, he experimented directly. He used Seedance 2.0 to produce a short that placed two AI generated versions of himself on screen simultaneously, debating questions of authorship and creative control. That AI short treated the technology as a medium worth understanding through practice. His Cannes argument draws on that firsthand experience, not on abstract objection.

"Torino Shadow"

"Torino Shadow" is filmed conventionally, with no AI in its production pipeline. Jia made it about cinema itself rather than through the lens of AI as a tool.

The 32 minute short is built around shadow puppetry, a form of storytelling with deep roots in Chinese culture, and traces what Turin and Taishan share architecturally and historically. The film explores how cinema creates collective memory that no single person owns. Jia won the Venice Golden Lion for "Still Life" in 2006 and built his reputation on close observation of Chinese collective experience. "Torino Shadow" continues that project in short form.

The Argument and the Award

Jia's position landed the same week Cannes officially banned generative AI from its competition and Tilda Swinton presented the Palme d'Or to Cristian Mungiu's "Fjord", declaring that films "really messy and about the human experience" left cinema safe from AI. The closing ceremony became a statement on collective versus algorithmic filmmaking.

Screen Daily listed "AI moves in" as one of the seven defining talking points of the 2026 Cannes edition. At the Marché du Film, running in parallel to the competition, more than 20 tech focused sessions dominated the final four days. Jia's distinction between AI's potential for impossible imagery and its incapacity for genuine collaboration sits at the center of that split.

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Sources

Variety | The Wrap | Screen Daily | The Hollywood Reporter | IndieWire