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The success of Lan Hongchun’s Dear You has brought him to Venice this year, one stop on a global festival tour where the Chinese filmmaker has been sharing the story behind his movie’s unlikely rise to a $300 million hit back home.
Lan’s small-scale but emotionally effective drama became a sensation on release earlier this year, tapping into themes of family and love that resonated in China — and are now resonating with the Chinese diaspora as the film finds a global release. Lan, who made Dear You for around $2 million, has been using his newfound platform to encourage audiences to take advantage of these favorable conditions and start creating themselves.
“I feel like we’re in an era where creators have so many more channels at their disposal,” says Lan, speaking on the sidelines of Venice. “Whether it’s the equipment they use or the platforms to showcase their work, the options are incredibly diverse. That’s why I believe it’s a time full of opportunities for everyday creators.”
Some of the latest examples of both the equipment — and the channels that are offering just that — have been front and center along the red carpet at Venice this year.
While the lion’s share of attention has obviously fallen, as usual, on the festival’s parade of stars — George Clooney and Maggie Gyllenhaal among them — Chinese smart device developers Honor has positioned two of its latest products behind the velvet ropes, hoping to turn the heads of a new generation of content creators as well as the talent.
Honor is the “official imaging strategic partner of the international promotion program for Chinese-language films” at Venice this year, with the program’s organizers inviting Lan to the festival to help make the push. But Honor is also using the occasion to unveil their Magic9 Pro Max at a film festival for the first time, showing it off alongside the company’s new Robot Phone, which generated buzz both at Cannes back in May as well as in Shanghai in June.
Developed through a creative collaboration between Honor, headquartered in the southern Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen, and the famed Munich-based camera and lens-makers Arri, both devices are designed to “push the boundaries of creation,” Honor says in a statement, while making “cinematic creation more accessible without compromising creative freedom.” Indeed, Honor calls the Robot Phone “a new species of smartphone.”
Both devices are being marketed as portable cinema cameras, and they’ve been hard to miss along the red carpet. Magic9 Pro Max’s moss-green back and Arri logo makes it look like a smaller version of one of the German brand’s famed movie cameras, and the Robot Phone delivers exactly what it promises: a mechanical robotic arm with a gimbal system that stabilizes the movement of a 200MP camera.
“The future is not simply about more pixels. It is about control. It is about empowering creators to capture beautiful images,” was the take from David Bermbach, chief product officer of Arri, in announcing the Magic9 Pro Max would feature at Venice. “Honor brings expertise in mobile imaging, powerful processing, and robotics. Arri contributes more than a century of trusted leadership in image science and professional production workflows. We come from different industries, but we share one ambition: to expand what creators can achieve with the tools they carry every day.”
For tech heads, there’s a lot here to dig into. The Magic9 Pro Max is down for an official launch in late September and Honor says the device will “further showcase Arri imaging capabilities and bring professional-grade cinematic imaging to a new generation of mobile users.” The Robot Phone comes with features that include that 4DoF gimbal, AI Object Tracking and the AI SpinShot. The claim with that robotic arm is that it “can rotate up to 180 degrees and track movements automatically for smooth, cinematic shots.”
For those less tech-savvy, the idea being pushed here is that these devices are light, portable and they produce cinema style content — “a serious tool in professional filmmaking,” according to Bermbach.
The Robot Phone’s appearance this year continues the hype being driven around the use of robotics in China. The country’s state-run media has been touting government investment in the field, with Morgan Stanley research predicting the industry will be worth $108 billion by 2028 — up from $47 billion in 2024. The technology has in the meantime been shifting away from the high-profile development of performative androids and into more everyday use in cameras and desktop computers.
There’s a similar buzz around how the country has embraced AI — an industry currently worth around $175 billion — and has likewise expanded its use into the by-now ubiquitous hand-held devices that help organize and entertain us day by day.
Honor has been introducing its devices to the public by rolling them out across a number of festivals so far in 2026. At Cannes in May, the China Night gathering was shown the Robot Phone’s features — including its robotic gimbal system, and the quality of content it can be used to produce. At the Shanghai Film Fest in June, the phone was used to make video portraits of the festival’s jury members.
“Looking back at a century of imaging, every major leap has come from the evolution of both light capture and intelligent processing,” says James Li, CEO of Honor, when talking up the Arri collaboration in a press release back in August. “Hardware sets the foundation for image quality, while algorithms deliver the leap. But technology is only the foundation, what ultimately defines great imaging is aesthetics. A century of filmmaking has shown us the power of precise control over light and shadow, a deep understanding of color and emotion, and the ability to make every frame tell a story.”
English (US) ·