Drifting, South: The economics behind a Chinese film's international win

Then Dai stepped in as a "post-director". By using montage techniques to weave the dancer's and the boy's emotional shots into the barbershop girl's storyline, the edit not only patches a narrative gap caused by the lack of a clear character arc, but also avoids the high costs of reshoots. This kind of "post-production narrative reconstruction" offers low-budget projects a viable, cost-effective way to resolve missing footage. It repairs the structure through editing, rather than pushing the risk back onto production through additional shooting.

The localized defocus issues caused by shooting on 16mm film also became a representative example of reducing costs through technical means. Fixing focus after film digitization is a well-known industry pain point: applying aggressive sharpening across the entire frame not only delivers poor results, but can also increases post-production costs. Dai's key innovation in this case lies in her "localized detail restoration" workflow. She first uses Topaz Labs' AI software to screen and identify defects, then employs DaVinci Resolve's PowerWindow and Tracker tools to concentrate the restoration on key areas such as characters' faces — solving the technical problem while preserving the film's texture.

Compared with traditional full-frame restoration, this hybrid approach of AI plus manual fine-tuning significantly reduces labor time and cost. The workflow has since been adopted and reused among some Chinese film editors, forming a replicable cost-saving practice.

Experts say there are takeaways for China's arthouse ecosystem from the success. When shoots under-deliver, an editor who can restructure the story and patch tech flaws is a more economical solution than restarting production. As AI repair trickles down, festival windows may become the default monetization path for micro-budget Chinese art films, with post crews — not investors — holding the risk-off switch.

Please contact the writer at hanjingyan@chinadaily.com.cn