Sixth Tone

7 stories

Sixth ToneChinaChina’s Short-Drama Boom Was Built on Speed. Then AI Got Faster. AI-powered production is upending China’s ultrashorts market, cutting shoots, budgets, and specialized crew work while forcing companies to find cheaper ways to keep live-action production viable.

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaInside China’s Shift From Short-Drama Sets to AI Factories

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaInside the Chinese AI Studio Shrinking Short-Drama Crews to One Former animators, cinematographers, and VFX artists are helping build AI systems that can script, storyboard, generate, and revise short dramas with unprecedented speed.

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaEye of the Storm: Viral Podcaster Breaks Silence Over Plagiarism Scandal A Chinese podcaster famed for grilling filmmaker Christopher Nolan takes shelter from claims she lifts content from overseas sources.

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaBehind China’s Unlikely Box-Office Hit, Indie Filmmakers Struggle to Be Seen The amateur-made “Niu Lai” found an audience against the odds. Thousands of other low-budget Chinese films never get the same chance.

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaChinese Cinema Turns Its Lens Outward “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East” is something new in China: a film about the outside world that treats its location as more than just a backdrop.

September 4

Sixth ToneChinaTwo Filmmakers, 1,100 Villages, and a Race to Record Rural China After once leaving rural China behind, two filmmakers returned to document the farmers and workers whose stories are fading from view as the countryside changes.

September 4

Cinepuuulse is a magazine, a radar and a diary about Asian cinema — Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand — read from Tokyo.

Our mark is 銀幕, ginmaku, the old word for the silver screen; it is the same two characters in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. A magazine, because every week one film is worth reading about slowly. A radar, because we count what the region's screens are talking about — box office, festivals, directors, anime, streaming — and show it as it moves. A diary, because a seal is set each day in that day's colour, and the days add up.

We read the local press in its own languages and bring it over in English: the Japanese film sites, the Korean trade papers, the Chinese culture desks, the Vietnamese and Thai entertainment pages. Everything here links back to the people who made it; the images belong to their authors.

Cinepuuulse will keep changing. New sources, new signals, new ways of looking — a little better each week, never finished. If a film here made you want to buy a ticket, that is enough.

Thank you for reading. ありがとうございます。