Hollywood
Australian filmmaker George Miller to head Cannes Jury in May
NEW DELHI: Australian director, screenwriter and producer George Miller will be heading the jury of the 69th Festival de Cannes.
The Festival will be held from 11 to 22 May.
Reacting to his appointment, Miller said, “What an unmitigated delight! To be there in the middle of this storied festival at the unveiling of cinematic treasures from all over the planet. To spend time in passionate discourse with fellow members of the jury! Such an honour! I’ll be there with bells on!”
It was in Cannes last May that Mad Max: Fury Road set out on its fantastic cavalcade across the screens. The film, shown Out of Competition in the Official Selection, marked the return not only of the hero of the legendary saga for the myriad fans of Max Rockatansky, but also the comeback of his creator, Miller, and of the visionary filmmaking that made him a household name around the world.
The roots of Miller’s career, alongside those of Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford and Phillip Noyce stretch back to the golden age of Australian cinema from the 1980s.
Originally from a small village in Queensland, Miller wrote and directed Violence in the Cinema, part 1 in 1971. Produced by his friend Byron Kennedy, with whom he founded the Kennedy Miller company, the short film picked up two prizes from the Australian Film Institute. This official recognition encouraged Miller to pursue a career in film and to make his first feature film.
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.
