The road has called Jia Zhangke again. His new picture, “Mamma Dunhuang,” tracks a woman’s drive from Dunhuang, in western China close to Central Asia, right down to the sea. The director speaks with Variety about the film, which he says features Zhao Tao as its lead. She won the David di Donatello Award for best actress for “Shun Li and the Poet,” and here she plays a woman returning home who relies on artificial intelligence to guide her across the route.
Once the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival closes on Sept. 30, location scouting and production design will start. The film is scheduled to shoot during early winter. Jia founded the festival, now in its 10th edition. Its official program features 51 films, and its online ticketing system drew more than 70 million visits this year.
The Pingyao Edition
This year, Jia’s festival has spent the past five years experimenting with AI. Last year”s edition worked with visual artist Xu Bing on a project called “AI-IF,” which asked people to create films using AI. Not all of this year’s official selections were made with AI. He says the festival’s AI projects have taken the form of exhibitions.
While Jia has kept a careful approach to technology, he refuses to let AI take part in producing “Mamma Dunhuang.”. Its function remains limited to its place within the narrative itself.
“It only plays a role in the story”
He says the festival has been careful with AI while keeping an open, watchful, and welcoming approach: “We must understand and discuss it, not shy away from it.”
Unknown Pleasures Acquires Cannes Titles
Jia co-founded Unknown Pleasures, a Chinese art-house distributor named after his 2002 film. The company is negotiating to acquire two Cannes titles, he says. In June, Unknown Pleasures announced deals for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” and Marine Atlan’s debut feature “La Gradiva.”
“We hope Unknown Pleasures’ acquired titles all have a great showcase in Pingyao,” Jia says.
Keeping It Small
Jia wants Pingyao to stay a safe place for people who love film instead of turning into a hall of fame. Rather than putting hundreds of movies on the schedule like most international festivals do, he plans to hold back the newest, carefully chosen titles at Pingyao’s lineup lean, built around the year’, so the attention stays fixed on the selected films and assists them in reaching the market.
The current lineup for the festival totals 51 titles. According to Jia, the organizers work hard to include movies with high artistic merit, reaching across as many countries and regions as they can. They place special emphasis on areas that are less known to Chinese viewers, including northeastern Europe and South America, in an effort to expose the audience to a wider range of filmmaking traditions.
The Capacity Problem
Pingyao’s online ticketing system logged more than 70 million visits this year. Jia says part of the problem is Pingyao’s limited capacity, as the ancient city “is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage [Site]. We’ve been working on building one more theater, ideally inside the ancient city walls, with 300–500 seats to enlarge the capacity. But it is very difficult to realize this plan, we are still discussing.”
Looking Forward
Jia claims that the broader film ecosystem and the media landscape have undergone drastic changes, along with technological advancements. Pingyao has stayed quick on its feet, he says, and the festival has been able to keep pace with the shifts in the film industry and surrounding media, adapting continuously to capture new developments for its curation.
He sees cinema evolving rapidly going forward, which means the festival will keep its agility intact for the future. That adaptability lets it react in real time to the most urgent cinematic and cultural subjects occupying people’s minds right now.
The festival’s take on AI keeps that same careful balance going — hands-on testing with the technology, but no actual use of it in his own production.
Where the paper stands
The paper backs Jia Zhangke’s film and its lead actress Zhao Tao, and is against any rule that would treat the film’s use of artificial intelligence as something dangerous in itself. The danger is not the technology, but the concentration of power that comes with it, and the paper’s worry is always the same: when the biggest firms ask to be regulated, the rules they get lock out everyone else. Licensing regimes and compliance costs are a moat, not a safeguard — a way to freeze today’s leaders in place and lock out whoever would have challenged them.
In this case, the film itself uses AI only within its own story. Jia’s approach to the technology is careful and watchful, not fearful, and the festival’s own experiments with AI have been limited to exhibitions rather than production. The paper’s position supports narrow rules against direct harm — forcing companies to disclose safety failures they hid — and opposes broad rules that hand the market to the incumbents.
Readers should watch for proposals that treat AI as a danger in itself, rather than as a tool whose misuse needs to be exposed. The paper’s stance is simple: let the technology exist, regulate the failures, and do not let the giants build a moat around themselves.
Source material: “Jia Zhangke Readies Zhao Tao Road Movie ‘Mamma Dunhuang,’ Rules Out AI in Production (EXCLUSIVE),” Variety.
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