Jia Zhang-ke on ‘Torino Shadow,’ AI Filmmaking and Future of Cinema

The idea for “Torino Shadow” came to Jia Zhang-ke not while he was making a film, but while he was avoiding one. Exhausted from wandering the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, he would sink into a chair in the vast central lobby and simply listen to the voices drifting from the surrounding galleries, absorbing the atmosphere of the museum.

“The starting point was to understand cinema from the perspective of an audience member, a cinephile – not as a filmmaker, but as a film lover,” Jia tells Variety through an interpreter. That distinction – between the professional who makes films and the person who needs them – sits at the heart of his 32-minute Cannes official selection short, which mk2 films is handling for world sales.

Jia is juggling several projects at once. While completing “Torino Shadow,” he simultaneously staged his first theater production – about an ancient Chinese physician celebrated for discovering medicinal herbs – which premiered May 1. Now he and the film are in Cannes.

For a filmmaker whose features have long chronicled the dislocations of modern China, “Torino Shadow” marks a more inward turn – a meditation on what cinema means rather than what it documents. The film moves between Taishan, in Guangdong province, and Turin, and the geographical pairing was not arbitrary. When Jia first visited Turin, the city’s distinctive arcade architecture – the connected corridors running along its streets – instantly called to mind the same style he knew from Taishan. The resemblance had a historical dimension: Taishan is a famous hometown of overseas Chinese, and many of its emigrants who went to San Francisco to build the railroad brought the architecture style back with them.

The film draws visual and cultural parallels between the two places – firemen in Taishan mirrored by firemen in Turin, shadow puppetry in Taishan echoed by shadow puppetry in the film museum. For Jia, that echo across continents is the premise of the film: not difference, but the shared texture of human life.

“Around 30 years ago, there was too much emphasis on cultural difference,” he says. “But now, after globalization, what we face are shared problems, shared lives. That is the basis on which we need to film from different perspectives, to offer each other our individual feelings – it is the basis on which we can communicate.”

Shadow puppetry carries particular weight in “Torino Shadow.” The Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s collection traces cinema’s full technological arc from early street-show curiosities to the modern moving image. Jia reads that history as evidence of a single, continuous human impulse. “Whether it’s shadow puppetry from the East or the moving images it eventually became, human beings have always made an effort to describe our emotions through fantasy, through imagery,” he says. The film also incorporates a long sequence from Nanni Moretti’s “Caro Diario,” threading a specific cinematic lineage through its argument.

That argument has a quietly urgent edge. Jia is frank about the anxiety driving the film: audiences for cinema are shrinking. “The aesthetic and philosophical pleasures that traditional cinema brings us – the number of people willing to feel them, to understand them, is gradually diminishing,” he says. “I want to use this short film to share my feeling with everyone: we need cinemas, we need cinema.”

It is a case he has also been testing against its most discussed rival. Earlier this year, around the Lunar New Year, Jia released a short film made with AI image-generation tools. He approaches the technology with characteristic deliberateness – neither dismissive nor credulous. His point is simple: he wants to understand something before he judges it. What the experiment clarified, above all, was the value of what it replaced. With AI, he says, it is just you and the engineer – two people, with all the imaginative limits that entails. Traditional filmmaking is a collective act, and for that he reaches for Stefan Zweig’s “The Tide of Fortune.” “I’d put it in one phrase: starry hours,” he says, invoking Zweig’s concept of those singular moments when human endeavor blazes brightest. “I like the feeling of starry hours.”

As for AI’s genuine potential, he locates it elsewhere entirely – not in imitating live-action cinema, but in rendering what cameras cannot reach. “Using AI we can discover 100 kinds of plants or flowers that don’t exist on Earth,” he says.

Jia’s feature film remains on course, if delayed. He had spoken of beginning production in December 2025; that timeline has shifted, and he now expects to start shooting after the Pingyao International Film Festival later this year. A title exists, he confirms, but his producer has asked him not to announce it yet.

Meanwhile, his distribution label Unknown Pleasures – named for his own 2002 Cannes competition entry – continues to expand. The company has acquired Filipino director Rafael Manuel’s “Filipinana,” which premiered at Sundance and screened at the Berlinale. Jia also mentions that Unknown Pleasures will participate in forthcoming projects from Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Miguel Gomes.