There had to be so much whirling around in Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s mind as the Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) was drawing to a close.

Important decisions were pending in his role as the jury head for the event’s main Golden Goblet competition, and there was a masterclass full of hungry young minds, ready to hang on his every word, scheduled for that very afternoon.

Then there was the effect of the constant and inescapable noise being generated in and around the festival all week long about factors affecting the very future of the film industry — chief among them the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and falling global box-office returns.

But what the Hong Kong star does when he sits down to chat is exactly what he’s been doing across a career that now spans over four decades. Leung delivers.

First, and unprompted, Leung sound-checks the recording equipment for the video crew who’ve joined us to make sure everything is running smoothly, and then he eases back into a conversation that covers all those issues, and more.

So let’s start with the industry-focused aspects of the discussion, because at this year’s SIFF there has been a stream of AI-focused seminars dissecting the pros and cons of these technological advances — and their impact on the film industry.

“I think AI is a double-edged sword,” he says. “It saves us a lot of time on pre-production and post-production. It saves a lot of money but this will go to mainstream movies, the popcorn ones — because [AI filmmaking] is easier and saves money. But at the same time, a lot of people have lost their jobs. You don’t need to think. There’s no creativity. It’s just calculations … there’s no soul.”

These are issues — and challenges — the industry will continue to face, says Leung, along with how to attract a rising generation for whom film is not the only entertainment option, as it was for him growing up in the Hong Kong of the 1970s, when there seemed to be a cinema down every street.

“When I was a kid, I enjoyed that kind of theatrical experiences. That, to me, is movies,” says Leung. “You have to watch it in a big screen. If not, you will miss a lot of film language, a lot of details. So when I was a kid, I used to watch a movie in a big cinema with a big screen, and this was just good.”

Leung has so far resisted the temptations of content offered on smaller devices — “I don’t even watch movies at home,” he says — and saw his masterclass as an opportunity to reach a younger audience in Shanghai, with a sold-out screening of his latest feature — the distinctly arthouse musing of Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend — set to precede the session.

“We need to educate them on how to enjoy different types of movies, not just one template,” he says. “It’s not just enjoyment, but sometimes [movies] don’t have an answer for you and you have to try to figure it out yourself. That’s why we need different kinds of movies. I think smaller-scale productions will dominate the market because of so many challenges — the short-form videos, the streaming, the gaming, and all other entertainment. The new generation, they have never had a theatrical experience so you have to find a way to invite these young kids to go to cinema.”

For the past week, Leung has led a jury of directors Guan Hu, Aktan Arym Kubat, Déa Kulumbegashvili and Fernanda Valadez, producer Dora Bouchoucha and actress Xin Zhilei.

They have watched, and discussed, and judged the relative merits of 12 films from a combined 15 countries and territories.

“It’s been a very interesting experience,” says Leung. “To me it’s a learning process because I can hear [the jurors’] opinions, and it’s very subjective. There are a lot of different perspectives, so it’s fun. I think you need surprises from movies and of course the film can resonate across our whole team, but all of us agree we can enjoy a movie in a different way.”

In terms of his own career — one that started with Hong Kong’s domestic TVB channel and has since moved through action classics (Infernal Affairs) and a brilliant spell under the gaze of auteur Wong Kar-wai (Happy Together, In the Mood for Love) and on to Hollywood (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) — Leung seems genuinely thrilled and inspired by the move into European arthouse circles with Enyedi.

“It was chaos,” he laughs, of his experience making a movie about the life of a ginkgo tree and the people who come into contact with it. “I really enjoyed working with such a mini crew. We found a harmony, like dancing together. You don’t know what we are going to do next. It’s really, really interesting and inspiring.”

Ahead awaits a previously announced project with fellow Hong Kong veteran Johnnie To, a return to his roots (of sorts) in a Hong Kong series made for a streamer, and more work with Enyedi, he says. There’s even the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye when offering a “maybe,” and a pause, to a question about the possibilities of a reunion with Wong.

“I choose the director first,” says Leung. “What kind of story, what genre, is not important to me. I need to have some feelings for this person or love their movies or I love this person but I never plan because I don’t want to control something that I can’t control because that’s life — it won’t happen as you wish.”

With the United States’ 250th birthday, the documentary filmmakers of Declarations: Black Americans and the Revolutionary War turned to modern technology to reclaim history.

Director Stacey Holman and her co-writer/fellow director Maya Tepler explained why chose to use generative AI to “give our historical subjects agency” and how they hope this documentary, premiering June 29 at 10pm ET on PBS, “will serve as a blueprint” for how to responsibly use the technology.

“How do you create a historical documentary centered on the disenfranchised, disregarded, and decentered? As documentary filmmakers, our options have always been limited,” they wrote in an essay for PBS. “The typical route has been archival materials. Archive is often a primary visual tool, but in the case of storytelling centered on historical Black narratives, archive is both limited and limiting.

“Portrayals of Black-centered narratives in early American art are few and far between. And the ones that do exist were faceless in fields, or caricatured — displayed as subservient property. In Declarations: Black Americans and the Revolutionary War, we knew we wanted to give our historical subjects agency on visual terms, as never seen before. In doing so, we aim to be a part of a long lineage of artists reclaiming and reshaping Black narratives,” Holman and Tepler added.

Declarations: Black Americans and the Revolutionary War follows the stories of four Black Americans as they navigate our country’s fight for independence and their individual pursuits of freedom, including James Lafayette, Harry Washington, Elizabeth Freeman and Abraham Peyton Skipwith.

Noting they “wanted to have animations” and “explore new technology to help us bring these stories to life,” Holman and Tepler enlisted artist and researcher Hudson Campbell, who made oil paintings of four historical subjects “rooted in accurate historical context” and “based on actual portraiture.”

“He then used AI tools to animate these portraits, preserving his artistic style while bringing the characters to life,” they explained. “Even for the animations and still images that do not feature the faces of our historical subjects, with time, the programs our animator used generated imagery centered on his own style and artistic vision.”

Campbell’s work was proved by the doc’s creative team and expert historical advisors: Colonial Williamsburg historical re-enactor and staff member Stephen Seals, professor and National Humanities Medal recipient Dr. Ed Ayers, and Oscar-nominated and Emmy-award-winning doc filmmaker Sam Pollard.

“We hope that this work will serve as a blueprint for how to use generative AI as a tool, while still being artist-centric, historically accurate, and in line with ethical storytelling practices,” added Holman and Tepler.

Declarations is not the first historical documentary on the Revolutionary War to use genAI, after Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup and Time Magazine released the animated short-form series On This Day… 1776 in January via YouTube

The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, if it goes through, would not only have a major impact on the future of the media business, but on our collective past.

Skydance Media, through its acquisition of Paramount, already controls the CBS News archive. If Paramount succeeds in taking over WBD, it will also assume control of the CNN archive, one of the most important in the news and documentary space. That’s cause for alarm among some who work constantly with the historical resources of CNN and CBS News.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Rochelle Widdowson, archival producer on the documentary Ghost in the Machine. “I think it’s really, really sad that there are a handful of people who are controlling these and I think it’s on all of us to kind of come together as a community and decide how we want to engage with this and this industry and the political side of things. Because if everyone’s just sitting to the side and saying, ‘Okay, we can’t go back,’ we can’t just magically make the archives reappear if they’re taken offline, if they’re destroyed. So, it’s a big issue right now.”

Widdowson spoke at a Q&A following a screening of Ghost in the Machine at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas. The film directed by Valerie Veatch draws on archives of CBS, Pond5, PBS, BBC and other institutions. Regarding archives like those of CNN and CBS News, Widdowson said, “These are moments of our history that you just can’t replace.”

Widdowson, an Australian native now based in New York, is part of the Archival Producers Alliance, a group founded in 2023 that boasts over 650 members. In June, Alliance founders Stephanie Jenkins, Rachel Antell, and Jennifer Petrucelli wrote an opinion piece for the nonprofit Poynter Institute elucidating what the authors called “one of the merger’s most dangerous consequences that the public has yet to fully realize: the silent consolidation of our nation’s memory.”

Jenkins, Antell, and Petrucelli argued, “The future preservation and accessibility of these archives are at risk if they are allowed to be merged under one private entity, as the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger would entail.”

They continued, “Archives are not just passive repositories of aired broadcasts. They are also stewards of extensive raw footage, original reporting and historical material that is often unavailable elsewhere. As archival producers with collective decades of experience, we are deeply concerned that this merger would lead to decreased access to invaluable material we rely on to tell compelling, accurate stories about our communities, our country and the world.”

Their piece noted, “History has shown us that corporate consolidation can further reduce — and politicize — access.

“In 2019, the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, instituted a policy to allow only Disney-owned outlets to license any of their aired stories, reporters or anchors. So if, for example, an independent documentary about Sept. 11 had wanted to use a clip of [anchor] Peter Jennings on that day, this policy would have prevented them from doing so, unless the film were to air on a channel like Disney+, ABC or Hulu. While the policy was ultimately reversed, dozens of documentaries were denied access to national stories in the meantime.”

Archives and AI

The Archival Producers Alliance has separately taken on another issue of huge concern to makers of documentaries and others who work with archives: the rise and already pervasive use of AI.

Last year, Jenkins, Antell, and Petrucelli wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that stated, “In the spring of 2023, we began to see synthetic images and audio used in the historical documentaries we were working on. With no standards in place for transparency, we fear this commingling of real and unreal could compromise the nonfiction genre and the indispensable role it plays in our shared history.”

They cited an example: “In February 2024, OpenAI previewed its new text-to-video platform, Sora, with a clip called ‘Historical footage of California during the Gold Rush.’ The video was convincing: A flowing stream filled with the promise of riches. A blue sky and rolling hills. A thriving town. Men on horseback. It looked like a western where the good guy wins and rides off into the sunset. It looked authentic, but it was fake.”

Widdowson, the Ghost in the Machine archival producer, articulated her concerns about the potential of AI to erode our collective sense of historical experience.

“It’s really worrying,” she said, “because if we don’t have a way to verify our history, it’s really hard to see where we’re going and it’s hard to learn from our past if we don’t actually know what has happened.”

At the Bentonville Q&A, she noted some archives are taking their collections off the internet to escape the reach of AI companies. “[That] makes it really hard for people like me to go through them, but if you have artificial intelligence and you have these tech companies going into their archives and sweeping through them and training data from them, that’s really worrying.”

Ghost in the Machine, which as Deadline reported has been acquired by the PBS series Independent Lens, traces the roots of AI to eugenics, the movement born in the 19^th century that posited the human race could be enhanced through selective breeding. The movement reached its apogee under the Nazis and while “eugenics” as a term has been relegated to the past, and its purported science has been effectively debunked, the film argues that eugenics’ ethos of perfectibility and super-intelligence is manifest in what might be called the ideology of AI.

Veatch’s film draws on archival materials from the 19^th century, through the 20^th and into our current era.

“I can’t remember even how long this archive cue sheet was, but it was definitely one of the longest I’ve ever worked on,” Widdowson commented. “I feel like there was like 900 at least pieces of different archive.”