Jia Zhangke Uses AI to Make a Film About Himself

At Hong Kong's Filmart in March 2026, Jia Zhangke presented an AI short he produced in three days using Seedance 2.0, ByteDance's AI video generation tool. The film places two AI generated versions of the director on screen simultaneously: one built to carry a visible AI quality and one rendered at higher fidelity, nearly indistinguishable from the actual filmmaker.

Two Versions of the Same Director

Jia won the Venice Golden Lion for Still Life in 2006 and Best Screenplay at Cannes. His body of work, from Platform to A Touch of Sin to Caught by the Tides, documents contemporary Chinese life at a level of observational precision that has defined his international reputation across three decades.

For the short, Seedance 2.0 generated both figures. One is the version Jia described as carrying an "AI feel", something in the rendering that signals synthetic origin to a viewer paying attention. The other presents as the real person. Jia declined to make the distinction between them the film's obvious point.

The Scene at the Center

The film's key moment arrives when the AI version inserts an optimistic line about a "new era". The human Jia objects. The AI responds with an argument Jia presented to Variety: once a work reaches its audience, interpretation no longer belongs solely to its creator.

That exchange turns the short into something more precise than a technology demonstration. It stages the question of who controls meaning in AI assisted work, using the filmmaker's own face and voice as the subject and the AI as the interlocutor. The AI then proposes a working arrangement: the filmmaker supplies the ideas, the machine supplies the computational power.

A Second AI Project

Jia also presented a second short, "Wheat Harvest", made with Kling AI. The two projects together reflect an approach to AI that treats it as a medium worth understanding through direct production rather than through critical position taking.

"I face new technology without making premature judgments", Jia told the masterclass at the Asian Film Awards Academy in Hong Kong's Grand Theatre on March 15. "I use it first to understand it".

Filmart 2026 and Asia's AI Moment

The Filmart masterclass was one of 28 sessions devoted to AI at the market. The Hollywood Reporter described AI as having "virtually taken over Filmart", reflecting how differently the technology reads in Asia compared to Hollywood.

Hollywood directors occupy a wide spectrum. Steven Soderbergh described AI as just another tool at the Sands Film Festival and positioned his own use as entirely enhancement based. Kathleen Kennedy has questioned whether AI generated work can achieve what she considers great filmmaking. Carlos Saldanha brought a comparable director's perspective to Busan. At the same Filmart event, Hong Kong director Peter Chan took a starkier view, warning that AI would replace commercially oriented blockbusters within three years, while sparing auteur cinema. Jia's approach at Filmart represents a fourth position: neither advocate nor critic, but active experimenter. Kore-eda's engagement takes a different form entirely: his competition entry at Cannes 2026, "Sheep in the Box", uses conventional production to place a humanoid AI at the center of a family drama, rather than using AI as a production tool.

Not a Pivot

When asked directly whether he plans to use AI in his next feature, Jia answered: "No".

He elaborated in conversation with The Standard Hong Kong: "I'm not worried about technology 'replacing' film. From its inception, film has always coexisted with new technologies. The camera itself was once an unsettling invention, but today it's part of our everyday life. What truly matters is how people use technology".

The AI short is an inquiry, not a career change. A director who sat on the Cannes jury in 2014 and built his reputation on close observation of human experience using Seedance 2.0 to put two versions of himself on screen and argue about authorship is doing what serious filmmakers do with any new medium: testing what it reveals. Filmmakers who want to run the same kind of direct experiment can start with AI video generation in AI FILMS Studio.

---

Sources

The Hollywood Reporter | Variety | The Standard Hong Kong | LA Review of Books | TechRadar