Hollywood
11 films from India at Busan this year, festival to show 100 feature films
NEW DELHI: 11 films from India will be screened at the forthcoming Busan International Film Festival next month.
To be held between 2 and 11 October, the Festival will open and close with two films from Greater China. The festival’s opening is the international premiere of Taiwan’s Paradise in Service, Doze Niu’s coming-of-age drama about a young soldier stationed at a brothel on Kinmen Island. The film is produced by Hou Hsiao-hsien. The world premiere of Hong Kong’s Gangster Pay Day by Lee Po-cheung about a washed-out gang boss who turns legitimate by taking over a restaurant, closes the festival. It stars Anthony Wong and Charlene Choi.
This year’s festival is screening over 100 Asian feature films among a total of 313 films (features and shorts) from 79 countries. The lineup includes the world premieres of 65 feature films and the international premieres of 33 feature films.
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny and Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a straw are among the six films that will be showcased in “A window to Asian Cinema” section.
Other films that will screen in the section include: Malayalam film Zahir by Siddharth Siva, Tamil film Goli Soda by Vijay Milton and Adityavikram Sengupta’s Labour of Love that earlier screened at Venice Days sidebar of Venice Film Festival.
Omung Kumar’s Mary Kom will be screened outdoors in a special programme titled Open Cinema. The film had its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival.
Sunrise by Paris based Indian filmmaker Partho Sen-Gupta will compete in the New Currents section.
Our Metropolis by Gautam Sonti and Usha Rao has been shortlisted for documentary competition while Balaka Ghosh’s Foot Prints in Desert will be screened in the Documentary Showcase section.
The festival will also screen Gitanjali Rao’s True Love Story that has earlier screened at Cannes Critics Week and has won award for best animation film at Mumbai International Film Festival.
The annual Korean Cinema Retrospective is dedicated to veteran director Jung Jin-woo. Hong Kong’s Ann Hui is this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year and her latest film The Golden Era will have a gala screening at the festival.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
