In Hengdian, China’s answer to Hollywood, the future of filmmaking is already here. Elsewhere in Zhejiang Province, productions that would traditionally require months of work, dozens of crew members and actors are now completed in a week. Where Western film industries nervously debate artificial intelligence’s role in creative work, China has decisively moved forward-not by replacing human creativity, but by retraining its workforce to harness AI as a tool for enhancement rather than replacement.
I witnessed this transformation first-hand during a CHINA-AID Educational Training Centre-sponsored month-long visit to Zhejiang province, and the implications for African storytellers are profound. The Training Program on Professional Skills for African Film and Audio-visualIndustry Practitioners was a robust initiative which proved that while we, in Africa, remain tethered to outdated paradigms – debating whether to embrace or resist technological change – China has leaped ahead by decades. The lectures received from Zhejiang Normal University’s film school proved that indeed AI is being embraced at every level and it is enhancing efficiency. The question facing African filmmakers isn’t whether to adopt these innovations, but how quickly we can do so while...
