Beijing – November 06, 2026 -- iQIYI used its NadouPro AI platform to recreate "Visiting Shanghai after Sixty Years", a 1938 film lost for nearly 90 years, with an eight-person team in two months. The project is shortlisted for the "2026 Future Images AI Unit" at the 39th Golden Rooster Awards, one of China's most prestigious film honors.
Team rebuilds film from stills, posters and newspaper clippings
The team at the iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory of Film Restoration had no surviving prints, reels or scripts of one of China's earliest science-fiction works, a comedy imagining life sixty years ahead. Instead of repairing damaged footage, the team generated the film from scratch. Its only guides were production still-photos, posters and newspaper clippings.
NadouPro locks character assets to keep appearances consistent
The film spans 1938 and 1998 and features multiple characters. Character consistency across shots is a known weakness of generative video. The team fixed permanent digital assets for each character's facial features, proportions and costumes upfront, and later shots drew from those files.
3D Director Studio gives filmmakers control over camera and composition
The team used NadouPro's 3D Director Studio to set character positioning, composition and movement, rather than relying on trial-and-error generation. The 1938 sequences follow early black-and-white cinema, with stable cameras and vintage lighting. The 1998 scenes use a documentary style with natural light and handheld camera movement.
Director Enji Yang said the platform moved the team from random image generation "toward shots with clear directorial intent". Script analysis, character design, scene design and storyboarding still came first.
iQIYI extends AI restoration work that began in 2017
iQIYI has researched AI film restoration since 2017. Its proprietary ZoomAI handles scratch repair, super-resolution, noise reduction and intelligent frame interpolation, moving restoration away from manual frame-by-frame work. Through the joint laboratory with Xiamen University, iQIYI has already returned a number of 4K classics to screens. The company is now applying AI to reconstruct lost films from surviving historical materials.