Let me begin with a grievance. All great criticism begins with a grievance. I am, above all else, a great critic.
Scott Meadow — Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and the man who has apparently decided that my suffering is a renewable resource he has not yet been taxed on — called me on a Thursday. Not an email. A call. At 7 in the morning. "Jackie," he said, with the cheerful terseness of a man who flies private and has chosen not to mention it, "we're sending you to Shanghai."
I was on a flight from JFK the following Saturday.
Twenty-two hours. I will say it again so the gravity settles: twenty-two hours. Including a seven-hour layover at Narita Airport in Tokyo, where I subsisted on vending machine coffee and a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma I had already read twice, and where I sat beneath fluorescent lighting so aggressively bright it constituted a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, specifically Article Four, which I am choosing to invoke. I endured this for The Cinema. The Cinema has never once thanked me, and yet I go.
I arrived in Shanghai on June 14th — the city opening itself like a shot in a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, all wet heat and neon and the particular alienation of a man who does not speak Mandarin, has never studied Mandarin, and has on several occasions declined the opportunity to do so, attempting to read a festival program. This is IRREVERENT's first coverage of the Shanghai International Film Festival, now in its 28th year, though I will note that I have been philosophically covering SIFF for years, in the sense that I have thought deeply about Chinese cinema and its relationship to the global film tradition, a tradition I alone am qualified to assess.
I had imagined, arriving at the Shanghai Film Art Center, that I would find what I always find at great festivals: the cinema in its proper, sacred form. Competition films. The Golden Goblet, SIFF's highest prize — presented in the shape of an ancient Chinese wine vessel, which is either the most poetic trophy in international cinema or a deeply confusing one, and either way I respect it — being contested by films with names like Halima and Sea Sons and My Own Last Supper. I had imagined panels about the enduring legacy of Hong Kong cinema. I had imagined the premiere of New Women, a silent film from 1934 receiving its 4K restoration with a newly composed score, which is the kind of event that reminds you why human beings invented the cinema house in the first place.
I had not imagined the fourth floor.
The AI BACKLOT occupies the fourth floor of the Shanghai Film Art Center the way a particularly confident parasite occupies a host organism. It is organized jointly by SIFF and something called Hailuo AI, a multimodal platform owned by a company named MiniMax, and I want to pause here to note that "MiniMax" sounds like the name of a Belgian discount supermarket chain and not, as apparently it is, a significant force in the algorithmic dismantling of human artistic expression. I looked it up. It is valued at forty billion dollars. MiniMax. Forty billion dollars.
Here is what the AI BACKLOT is, and I relay this information not as an endorsement but as a war correspondent relays the coordinates of an advancing enemy. SIFF ran a 43-day open call. Five hundred creators from seven countries applied. Four production teams were selected. Each team pairs traditional filmmakers with what the literature approvingly calls "AI super-creators" — a phrase that would have made Jean-Luc Godard weep, and I say this as someone who has studied Godard's complete filmography, including the lesser-known early work he made under the pseudonym Pierre Deschamps before the events of 1963. These teams will produce short films. They will document their workflows, their budgets, their decisions. The documentation will be compiled into a "reference sample" addressing "core industry concerns regarding AI tools, creator agency, and the future of content production."
A reference sample. They are creating a reference sample. Federico Fellini shot 8½ in 1963 — a film about a director who cannot make a film — and I believe, had Fellini been alive today and had he somehow found himself on the fourth floor of the Shanghai Film Art Center, he would have gotten back on the plane, flown to Rome, and bricked up the door.
The showcase was open to the public on June 14th and 15th. I attended. My notes, transcribed from a napkin I found in my blazer pocket, read as follows: "fluorescent. young. laptops. no one is wearing an ascot."
June 15th. My first full day in Shanghai. I had options.
I could have attended the SIFFORUM panel — "Hong Kong Cinema: A Legacy in Succession" — and engaged with questions of cultural inheritance, the beautiful problem of what it means to pass the flame from one generation to the next without burning everything down. I could have gone to the restoration screening of New Women, a silent film about a woman navigating a city that doesn't want her, which has waited ninety years for the audience it deserves. I could have sat quietly in a cinema house, in the dark, and let the light through the projector do what light through projectors was made to do.
Instead, I attended four consecutive sessions of the AI filmmaking programming, because Scott Meadow sent me here to cover this, and I am a professional, and I suffer professionally.
10 AM: "Legal Pitfalls in AI Filmmaking." I sat in the Lumiere Hall and listened to forty minutes of panelists discuss copyright liability. There was no moment of cinema in this room. There was not even the shadow of a moment of cinema. There was a woman with a clicker and a slide about attribution frameworks. She had prepared the slide beautifully. I cannot stress enough how little this helped.
11 AM: "AI + Live-Action: New Models of Hybrid Production." At some point during this session, a man used the phrase "creative pipeline" and meant it as a compliment. He said it twice. The second time, he smiled.
1 PM: "Hailuo AI Special Session: AI Filmmaking 3.0 — The Next-Gen Creator Revolution." The language here deserves preservation as a document of the age. "3.0." They have versioned the revolution. This is what we are doing now: iterating on the revolution. Deploying patches to the revolution. The revolution, I am told, is backward compatible.
2:15 PM: "From Debut to Handmade: The Director Who No Longer Waits for YES." I will grant this session its title, which is genuinely evocative, and then I will immediately take it back, because the session itself was thirty minutes of a man explaining how he bypassed the traditional development process using generative tools, and the absence of gatekeepers he celebrated is the same absence of gatekeepers that produced, in his own words, "seventeen short films last year." Seventeen. Ingmar Bergman — who directed Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and, as I have argued extensively in print, also secretly directed the original Spartacus — made masterpieces because the agony of not making them was the entire engine. Seventeen short films a year is not agony. Seventeen short films a year is not cinema. Seventeen short films a year is a Substack.
And then something happened that I am reluctant to report, because reporting it feels like a concession I have not prepared to make.
In the afternoon, on the fourth floor, one of the AI BACKLOT teams was doing a live creation session. I watched, from a distance, with the studied contempt of a man who has been awake for thirty-six hours across eleven time zones. They were building a sequence — a woman walking through a city at night, rain, the particular blue-black of urban darkness. The AI tool was generating footage from text prompts. They were adjusting, arguing, disagreeing about the color temperature of a streetlamp.
And for approximately forty-five seconds, the light on the screen was correct.
Not beautiful. Not art. Correct, in the way that a thing can accidentally find its own gravity. The woman moved through the frame and the frame held her for a moment with something that felt — almost, I stress almost, I stress the almost with everything I have — like intention.
It was worse than if it had been terrible. If it had been terrible I could have walked away with my convictions intact. Instead I stood there in my linen blazer in Shanghai, twenty-two hours of travel in my body like sediment, and I thought about the Czech director Miroslav Vašíček, who spent forty years making films no distributor would touch, and who said in his only interview — in Positif, 1987, an interview I have read so many times I have developed opinions about the typography — that the cinema was not about what the camera captures but about what the person behind the camera refuses to let go.
Forty-five seconds. Then it was gone. The sequence shifted. The light went wrong again. The revolution continued.
I took the escalator back down to the lobby. Outside, Shanghai was enormous and indifferent and entirely uninterested in my conclusions. I found a place that sold congee and sat down and wrote this dispatch on my phone, because my laptop was in my hotel room and my hotel room required a key card I had left in my other blazer.
The Cinema endures. It does not, apparently, require me to be comfortable. It has never required me to be comfortable. I begin to suspect this is intentional.
Jackie Esiskel is IRREVERENT's Movie & Film Correspondent. He has survived Cannes, a 22-hour flight to Shanghai, and the fourth floor. He is currently awaiting a direct return flight, which Meadow has not yet confirmed. He has asked. Meadow has not responded. He has sent a follow-up.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Esiskel's relationship with reality remains, at best, complicated. We are obliged to clarify the following: (1) Jean-Luc Godard did not direct films under the pseudonym "Pierre Deschamps," and there were no "events of 1963" prompting him to abandon such work. (2) Ingmar Bergman did not direct Spartacus (1960); that film was directed by Stanley Kubrick. (3) There is no record of a Czech director named "Miroslav Vašíček," and the interview attributed to him in Positif (1987) appears to have been fabricated entirely by Mr. Esiskel. We have informed Mr. Esiskel. He responded that our corrections do not, in his words, "register with the same emotional force as a parking ticket issued to a vehicle I have already sold." So, yeah, that.