The Shanghai Exhibition Center on Yan’an Road is not, architecturally speaking, a building that invites lingering. Its Soviet-influenced neoclassical facade and cavernous interior halls were designed for industrial trade exhibitions, not the kind of conversations that determine which films get made and which ones stay on a hard drive somewhere. But for four days in late June — June 20 to 23 — the Eastern and Western halls of that building became the operational center of the 2026 Shanghai International Film & TV Market, and the conversations that happened inside them will shape a meaningful portion of what Asian and international cinema looks like over the next two to three years.
The Market is not new, but its current form is recent. It was consolidated from the separate SIFF Market and STVF Market tracks into a single exhibition platform, designed to run concurrently with the tail end of the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival and the opening days of the 31st Shanghai TV Festival. The consolidation was partly logistical, but it also reflected a clearer organizational logic: that the line between film and television has become too porous to justify treating them as separate commercial ecosystems. Production companies, distribution agencies, investors, technical service providers, VR film developers, micro-drama studios — all of them were in the same halls, and the overlap was deliberate.
The benchmark figures from the previous edition, cited in SIFF’s own promotional materials at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, give a sense of the scale: 200 international exhibitors, more than 50 industry events including forums, panel discussions and project pitches, and over 10,000 professionals from around the world. The 2025 edition also resulted in nearly 20 films from the festival securing theatrical releases in China in the following twelve months — a conversion rate that is more meaningful than any attendance figure, since it measures what actually happened after people left the building.
The market’s programming structure this year operated on what its organizers described as twin engines: exhibitions and industry events. The exhibition side gathered production companies and distributors in booths, allowing buyers and sellers to establish the kind of face-to-face contact that is harder to replicate in any other format. The events side covered a wide range of activities — project presentations, policy releases, industry seminars, thematic salons, and one-on-one meetings — all oriented toward project incubation, copyright transactions, and co-production discussions. The market’s director Chen Jie has previously noted that compared to the major European festival markets at Berlin and Cannes, which concentrate heavily on copyright trading, the SIFF market covers the entire industry chain, from production financing through to legal services and distribution logistics. That comprehensiveness is a deliberate positioning choice and also a reflection of where China’s film industry actually operates.
One of the market’s most significant structural functions is SIFF Project, the festival’s film incubation platform, which runs in parallel with the Market as its development-stage counterpart. This year’s 19th edition of SIFF Project selected 31 projects across five categories: new talent, genre, international co-production, pre-production, and work-in-progress. The jury — led by Joan Chen and joined by director Sam Quah and actress Ma Yili — awarded the top Annual Focus prize to Juno Hong’s debut feature Only the Moon Knows, one of three projects presented in the international co-production section. The film follows Cheng Jun, a Chinese international student working the night shift at a 24-hour convenience store who forms an unlikely friendship with an elderly homeless woman who shelters there each night. Hong described the film’s theme as one in which “loneliness is a universal human condition,” and the project’s selection for the co-production track was designed to connect it with international partners who can help bring it across that universality.
Four other projects claimed double prizes. Kaia Gao’s debut In-Development project A Room of Her Own won the FunAge cash award of RMB 150,000 and Best Talent Project. Mum took Most Creative Project. There Will Be Snow, directed by Chen Jianying, won Best WIP Project and the Inbetween Award. Murder Television, the second feature from Jigme Trinley, won Best Genre Project and a Regent Special Focus Award. The four-day program included project presentations, WIP clip screenings, and one-on-one meetings connecting filmmakers with studios, post-production companies, and distributors. The SIFF Project track matters not just for what it produces immediately but for what it tracks over time: Her First Taste, which won Best Film in the Asian New Talent section at this year’s Golden Goblet Awards, was a SIFF Project WIP participant in a previous edition. The feedback loop between the development market and the competition program is real and documented.
A parallel development initiative ran on the television side of the market. The Multiverse Micro-Drama Project, co-launched by the International Film & TV Market and Fanqie Novel — the short-form IP platform operated by ByteDance — with Dreamina AI as its exclusive technology partner, brought the rapidly expanding micro-drama sector directly into the market’s commercial framework. The project accepted submissions of adaptations of Fanqie Novel IPs in any form — live-action, 2D or 3D animation, or AI-generated content — and was designed explicitly to steer the format away from what organizers called “assembly-line production” toward what they termed “quality-driven craftsmanship.” Evaluation criteria focused on four dimensions: core values, storytelling and creativity, production and audiovisual quality, and audience reception. Selected projects had their trailers pitched to industry professionals during the Market and were subsequently launched on Fanqie Novel, Douyin, and Hongguo Short Drama following approval. Pure AI works produced using Dreamina AI received 50,000 platform credits as incentive support. The presence of ByteDance-affiliated infrastructure inside a state-affiliated film festival market is notable in itself — it reflects how thoroughly the micro-drama economy has become integrated into the mainstream of Chinese content production.
The AI dimension of the market extended beyond the micro-drama track. The AI Backlot programme, co-launched with Hailuo AI (MiniMax), was the festival’s most visible experiment in AI-film collaboration: four cross-border creative teams were each assigned one traditional director and one AI creator, given a month to produce original short films, and their process was then put on public display at Shanghai Film Art Center on June 14 and 15. The resulting shorts — including A Message for the Butterfly, a collaboration between Chinese director Hou Zuxin and German AI filmmaker Mark Wachholz — were screened alongside their raw materials: prompts, storyboards, revision histories, original footage. The transparency was the point. At the same event, the Communication University of China released what was described as the world’s first Industry Observation Report on AI-Film Hybrid Creation, a production-cycle document intended to function as a practical reference for the industry rather than an academic argument. MiniMax also took the occasion to launch Hub, its all-in-one AI video platform that consolidates image generation, video production, voiceover, music, and editing into a single interface.
What AI Backlot was trying to resolve, at a practical level, is a question the market as a whole was circling from multiple directions: how does a content industry restructure itself when the tools that produce content are changing faster than the contracts that govern them? The micro-drama sector is one answer — a format that emerged precisely because short-form AI-assisted production lowered the barrier to entry so drastically that a new content economy grew up almost overnight, one that the Multiverse project was now trying to bring under some form of quality standard before it calcifies into a race to the bottom. The AI Backlot programme was another answer — a controlled experiment in which collaboration replaces displacement as the operative framework. Neither of these is a resolution to anything. They are both attempts to make the question visible enough that the industry can begin to respond to it with something more than anxiety.
The market’s geopolitical footprint has been expanding steadily, and the 2026 edition reflected that in several ways. The Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance — initiated by SIFF and now comprising 57 member institutions from 50 countries — provides the structural backbone for co-production and distribution relationships that the Market itself cannot fully facilitate. This year’s Belt and Road Film Week within the festival focused on cultural exchange between China and Arab countries, including an Arabian Souk and Culture Market event. An Egyptian Film Week — presented with China Media Group to mark the 70th anniversary of China-Egypt diplomatic relations — brought masterworks by Youssef Chahine alongside contemporary Egyptian productions. For the China-Brazil Year of Culture, the International Film & TV Market opened with a Brazil Night ceremony, framing the bilateral relationship in commercial terms from the first day of the Market itself.
The Brazil dimension was not purely ceremonial. The STVF’s special screening of the 1976 Brazilian telenovela Escrava Isaura, with actress Lucélia Santos attending in person, pointed to something real: the show was a cultural phenomenon in China when it aired in the 1980s, and the nostalgia it carries among Chinese audiences represents a kind of soft infrastructure for the content relationship between the two countries. Brazilian submissions to the 31st STVF rose significantly year over year, consistent with a broader shift in the Magnolia Awards’ geographical distribution — away from a Europe-centric concentration toward what the STVF described as a more balanced presence across Asia, the Middle East, and South America. São Paulo’s interest in the Yangtze River Delta Film and Television Production Service Cooperation Alliance, documented in the 2025 market reports, suggests the relationship is moving from cultural to commercial.
For international companies arriving in Shanghai for the first time, the market offers a specific kind of access that is not available at Berlin or Cannes: direct proximity to buyers who are making decisions about what enters the Chinese theatrical market, and to producers who are actively looking for co-production structures that can help Chinese projects cross in the other direction. Singaporean director Anthony Chen, who chaired the Asian New Talent jury at this year’s Golden Goblet Awards, made the point plainly at SIFF’s Berlin promotion in February: “Every time I go to SIFF, I run into so many industry people. So, if you’re looking to make your mark in the Chinese film industry, you have to go to Shanghai — it’s home to the country’s biggest film market.” The comment was directed at an audience of European and international filmmakers at the Berlin Film Festival, and it was not a sales pitch. It was a description of how the industry actually functions.
The talent development ecosystem that feeds into the market — SIFF Project, SIFF NEXT, SIFF ING, and SIFF YOUNG — matters because it determines the quality and range of projects that arrive at the market in a financeable state. SIFF YOUNG, in its fifth edition this year, selected nine filmmakers for a program focused specifically on commercial filmmaking talent, a deliberate shift from earlier editions. The SIFF ING programme launched a Mobile Filmmaking Camp, mentored by cinematographer Gao Weizhe (Black Dog), actor Qu Chuxiao (The Wandering Earth), and director Nick Cheuk (Time Still Turns the Pages), providing ten young filmmakers with an iPhone, funding, and guidance. The resulting shorts ranged from sci-fi to romance, and the iPhone’s presence as a production tool was itself a market signal: that accessible hardware is reshaping who can make work that reaches a professional standard.
The market’s commercial logic is, at its core, straightforward: China is the world’s second-largest film market by admissions and has been the top-grossing market in some recent years. Any international film that secures Chinese theatrical distribution is accessing an audience of significant scale. Any Chinese film that develops meaningful international co-production relationships gains access to financing, distribution infrastructure, and festival credibility that is harder to build domestically. The International Film & TV Market exists at the intersection of those two interests, and it has been building the infrastructure to serve both for long enough that the relationships formed here tend to persist. The 10,000 industry professionals who attended the 2025 edition didn’t all come because the program was comprehensive. They came because other people they needed to talk to were already going to be in the same building.
Whether the 2026 edition produced deal volumes comparable to its predecessor won’t be fully quantifiable until the projects that were discussed in those rooms in late June begin to surface in financing announcements and production starts over the next twelve to eighteen months. That is always the deferred promise of a market week: the conversations that happen there are the beginning of processes that play out elsewhere. What was visible in the structure of the 2026 programme was a market that has become confident enough in its own institutional weight to push into questions — about AI, about micro-drama quality, about the commercial integration of Arab and Latin American content into a China-centered distribution network — that a more cautious institution might have left for later. Whether those bets pay off is a different question from whether they were worth making. For now, the Shanghai Exhibition Center has been put away until next June, and the people who were inside it are working on what comes next.
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