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iQIYI Revives 90-Year-Old Lost Film with NadouPro, Shortlisted for the AI Unit at the Golden Rooster Awards
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BEIJING, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — iQIYI, China’s leading online entertainment platform, is pioneering a new path in AI-powered film restoration through NadouPro, the company’s AI platform built for professional film and television production. NadouPro has enabled the creative restoration of “Visiting Shanghai after Sixty Years”, a short film lost for nearly 90 years. This shows how AI can restore films with almost no surviving original footage, bringing them back to life.
Completed by an eight-person team at the iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory of Film Restoration in just two months, the project has recently been shortlisted for the “2026 Future Images AI Unit” at the 39th Golden Rooster Awards. The Golden Rooster Awards are among China’s most prestigious film honors, underscoring the project’s industry recognition.
The Challenge: Building a Movie Without Footage
Traditional film restoration typically relies on surviving film materials, using digital technologies to repair damage and enhance image quality. However, with the original 1938 release of “Visiting Shanghai after Sixty Years” – one of China’s earliest science-fiction works, which used comedy to imagine life sixty years into the future – there was almost nothing left to repair. All physical prints, reels, and scripts had been lost over the decades. Instead, the team had to generate the film from scratch using only production still-photos, posters, and newspaper clippings as conceptual guides.
“NadouPro allowed us to step outside the conventional restoration mindset,” said Zidong JIANG, Member of iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory and iQIYI’s Director of AI Restoration Technology. “With no surviving film prints to restore, we used AI to undertake a creative reconstruction of the film based on available historical materials.”
Building a film from the ground up highlighted two major complexities in generative video: maintaining character consistency across scenes and achieving precise camera control. The team utilized NadouPro to address both.
Maintaining Continuity Through Digital Assets
The film spans two distinct historical eras – 1938 and 1998 – and features multiple characters. In generative video, ensuring characters retain the same appearance across different shots is historically difficult.
NadouPro solved this by acting as a centralized production hub. Rather than generating characters anew for every scene, the team used the platform to lock in permanent digital assets for each character’s facial features, proportions, and costumes upfront. Subsequent shots drew from these foundational files, keeping character appearances perfectly consistent throughout the film.
