Jury Insights – Interview with Aihui Dong

Next up in our “Jury Insights” series is Aihui Dong, Producer, Creative Advisor & Curator, who joins this year's Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards jury.

Aihui has produced and directed 23 film projects, with selections at festivals including Berlinale, Venice, Warsaw, Busan, and SXSW. In 2025, he was named Producer of the Year and recognized as Creative Person of the Year.

In this conversation, he discusses how AI is appearing primarily at the tool level in this year's entries, rather than replacing genuine creative decisions. He explains that a real emotional connection, engagement with something bigger than the brand, and genuine innovation are what separate a good entry from an award-winning one. He also makes the case that the energy and environmental sector is the industry most in need of a more human way of telling its story.

“A good entry is well made; an award-winning one refuses to leave you alone afterward ” – Aihui Dong

Q: Can you tell us a little about your professional journey? What has been the most defining moment of your career so far?

I've spent the last eighteen years working as a producer, creative advisor, and curator, essentially living in the space between the Eastern and Western creative industries. I actually started out on the promotion and marketing side, advocating for directors nobody had heard of yet and trying to get their work in front of the right festivals and juries. That early period taught me a lesson I've never let go of: brilliant work rarely finds its audience on its own, it needs someone willing to fight for it. As for a defining moment, this past November was hard to top. Becoming the first Asianb producer to win Producer of the Year at the Shorty Impact Awards, and standing on a list alongside names like Michelle Obama and UNICEF, made me feel that the two-way bridge I've been trying to build for so long is finally carrying real traffic in both directions.

Q: Has participating in the jury changed the way you view your own work or the industry?

Enormously. When you judge across the Telly, Shorty, Webby, and Cannes panels, you stop seeing your own taste as any kind of universal standard and start noticing how differently a story can land depending on where it was made and who it's speaking to. It's made me a more humble producer, honestly. I go back to my own projects now and ask harder questions: Does this actually travel, or does it only work for the room it was made in? Judging has also convinced me that the industry is far more porous than it used to be; the best ideas are crossing borders faster than ever, and the panels that recognize that early are the ones shaping where the craft goes next.

Q: What are your impressions of this year's entries? Are there any trends or approaches that have caught your attention?

The obvious one is AI, and it's everywhere in this year's submissions, but I'd push back gently on the panic around it. What I saw was AI showing up mostly at the tool level: speeding up post-production, opening up visual options, lowering the cost of experimentation. It hasn't replaced the creative decision at the heart of the work, and frankly the entries that leaned on it as a gimmick were the easiest to spot and the quickest to forget. In an AI-driven world, human thought is still the irreplaceable part. The pieces that stayed with me used the technology quietly, in service of something a person genuinely wanted to say.

Q: In your view, what distinguishes a good entry from an award-winning one?

A good entry is well made; an award-winning one refuses to leave you alone afterward. For me it usually comes down to three things working at once: a real emotional connection, a willingness to engage with something bigger than itself, some issue the wider world is wrestling with, and genuine innovation in the production and visual language rather than a safe, competent execution. Technique on its own has never won me over. It's when the craft is inseparable from the story, and the whole thing has a singular voice that challenges or moves you, that a piece crosses from “good” into something I'll still be thinking about days later.

Q: What does a corporate film need to have for it to stay in your mind long after the judging is over?

It has to carry a message with enough weight that it resonates regardless of the viewer's culture or background. So many corporate films are built for a single market or a single boardroom, and you can feel that ceiling the moment they start. The ones I remember are the ones that found the universal thread inside the specific brand story, something a viewer in Shanghai and a viewer in Lisbon would both recognize as true. If a corporate film can make me feel that its core idea would survive translation into any language, it's already done more than most.

Q: If you could see one industry (e.g. Finance, Tech, Pharma) completely reinvent the way it tells its stories, which would it be—and why?

The energy and environmental sector, without hesitation. I'm two years into a feature documentary right now about indigenous communities and the survival pressures they face in the wake of new environmental policies, so I've seen up close how badly that world tells its own story. It tends to default to statistics, policy language, and images of hardware, when the actual stakes are deeply human and often heartbreaking. If that industry learned to tell its stories through the people living the consequences, with real cinematic ambition rather than corporate messaging, it could change public understanding far faster than another report ever will.

Q: As a jury member, what do you believe is the true value of awards, and why are platforms like the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards important for the industry?

I've come to see awards as one of the most underrated diplomatic tools we have. Over eighteen years I've essentially built a method around this: rather than chasing commercial distribution first, I help creators earn international recognition and then use that credibility to open the doors that market access requires. Awards are the credential that lets unknown work be taken seriously in a room where it otherwise wouldn't get five minutes. Platforms like the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards matter because they set a shared, cross-border standard for what excellence looks like, they give strong work from anywhere, including places still fighting for a seat at the table, a legitimate path onto the global stage. That's exactly the kind of two-way traffic I've spent my career trying to build.