The Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival, long centered on traditional filmmakers, saved a seat for AI this year. On November 10, the 2026 China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival "Golden Rooster Film AI Unit · Presentation Ceremony" was held in Xiamen, Fujian. This national-level film festival, founded in 1992 and held in different cities across the country in turn, has set up a film AI unit for the first time. It aims to explore the practical application and implementation of artificial intelligence in film and television creation, and to give creators from different backgrounds a stage to showcase their work, exchange ideas, and connect.
287 Teams, 72 Hours to Decide the Winner
As the centerpiece of the unit, the AI Hackathon attracted 287 teams to register, and 20 ultimately made the shortlist, taking on the same prompt in a 72-hour timed creation challenge. Using AI tools, participants turned story ideas in their heads directly into visuals, completing the entire process from creative planning and script polishing to final film production in an extremely short time. What they were competing on was no longer just creativity, but the efficiency of human-AI collaboration.
Nobody Knows, produced by the team Dengdeng Zhiliao, won the Top 1 Recommended Work honor at the AI Hackathon. On the main competition side, the nominations for the 39th China Golden Rooster Awards had already been announced. The red carpet ceremony kicked off at 18:00 on November 10, and the awards ceremony and closing ceremony followed at 19:45. The AI unit and the traditional awards appearing on the same stage means the tech camp and the academic camp are standing side by side under the same spotlight for the first time—when the barrier to production is flattened by algorithms, the authority to define cinema may need to be redistributed.