Shanghai Film Festival Launches AI Backlot with Hailuo AI

The 28th Shanghai International Film Festival opens June 12 and brings with it AI Backlot, a new production lab pairing traditional filmmakers with AI creators to produce short films live during the 10 day event. Hailuo AI, the multimodal platform owned by MiniMax, is providing technical support.

What the AI Backlot Does

AI Backlot is not a competition for finished AI films. It is a structured production program: four teams received a one month window to conceive, produce, and complete original short films, with each step of the process, including workflows, role assignments, key decisions, and budgeting, documented for public access.

The program launched in May after a 43 day open call that drew nearly 500 applications from creators across seven countries and regions. Over 60 percent of applicants were born in the 1990s or 2000s. The organizing committee then selected four production teams totaling 22 people, drawing from both traditional film and television backgrounds and what organizers describe as "AI super creators".

Teams Built Across Two Practices

Each team combines professionals from conventional film production with practitioners who work primarily through generative tools. The intention is to document what that collaboration actually looks like in practice, rather than presenting only the finished work.

The academic partner for the initiative is the School of Theater, Film and Television at the Communication University of China. Lingang, the Shanghai district that hosted the launch event at its Wisdom Library, is the program's operational base.

Exhibition and Documentation

The completed films and production records will be presented to industry guests and the public on June 14 and 15 at the Shanghai Film Art Center, 4th floor. Supervisory panel members, academic observers, and the four production teams will together select 10 to 15 key topics from the production process to discuss in workshops open to the public.

The documentation focus is the distinctive element. The program treats the production workflows themselves as content, which gives it a research dimension beyond the short films it produces.

SIFF ING and the Festival's AI Program

AI Backlot sits within a broader festival strand called SIFF ING, a new program focused on AI generated content and vertical short videos. SIFF ING represents the festival's formal acknowledgment that short form AI content now requires its own dedicated track alongside traditional competition categories.

The 28th SIFF runs June 12-21 across 48 cinema locations in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta. The Golden Goblet Competition features 12 films from 15 countries, with the jury chaired by actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Total entries across all five competition categories exceeded 2,800.

Hailuo AI and MiniMax

Hailuo AI is a product of MiniMax, one of the leading Chinese AI startups. MiniMax has positioned Hailuo as a multimodal platform for filmmakers and content creators. Its involvement with SIFF gives the platform direct exposure to Asia's most prominent film festival while the festival gains a technical partner with production ready tools.

China's film industry has been integrating AI into production at industrial scale for years, led largely by the micro drama and vertical content sector. AI Backlot brings that integration into the institutional festival context for the first time, with SIFF staking out a position as the festival where traditional and AI-native filmmakers learn to work together in public.

That framing connects directly to what Chinese filmmakers like Jia Zhangke explored at Filmart earlier in 2026: using AI tools experimentally while keeping directorial control at the center. AI Backlot scales that individual experiment into a structured institutional program.

Filmmakers who want to build their own AI workflows can access video generation, image generation, and audio tools in AI FILMS Studio.

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Sources

China Daily | Screen Daily | Yicai Global | Asian Movie Pulse | Variety