Inside Venice’s Unlikely Double Feature: A $300 Million Hitmaker and a New Generation of Smart Devices
At the Venice Film Festival, Chinese director Lan Hongchun is promoting his sleeper hit Dear You, a $2 million family drama that unexpectedly grossed $300 million in China, while Chinese tech firm Honor uses the festival to showcase new smartphone hardware aimed at content creators. The pairing reflects a wider push, backed by Venice's Chinese-language film promotion programme, to highlight both grassroots filmmaking success and accessible creative technology, with Honor positioned as the event's official imaging partner.
Honor unveiled its Magic9 Pro Max at a film festival for the first time, alongside its Robot Phone, both developed with German camera maker Arri and marketed as portable cinema cameras. The Magic9 Pro Max, styled after Arri's professional cameras, launches officially in late September, while the Robot Phone features a 200MP camera stabilised by a robotic gimbal arm capable of rotating up to 180 degrees, along with AI object tracking and automated "SpinShot" filming. Arri's chief product officer, David Bermbach, said the collaboration aims to give everyday creators greater control and cinematic-quality imaging tools.
- Director Lan Hongchun promotes $300m Chinese hit Dear You at Venice
- Honor unveils Magic9 Pro Max and Robot Phone camera devices there
- Devices built with Arri target creators wanting cinema-style mobile filming
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Venice's Chinese-language film promotion programme, backed by the festival, has put two very different success stories side by side this year. One is Dear You, a family drama made for a modest $2 million by director Lan Hongchun that went on to take roughly $300 million at the Chinese box office, a scale of return few films ever achieve. The other is Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker using the festival as a launchpad for hardware aimed squarely at people who make video content.
Honor's presence is built around a partnership with Arri, the well-known German manufacturer of professional cinema cameras. Together they have produced two devices, the Magic9 Pro Max and the Robot Phone, both styled and marketed as ways of bringing film-set-level camera technology into a handheld device, with features such as high-resolution sensors, motorised stabilisation and automated filming modes.
The pairing matters because it reflects a broader trend of Chinese creative and technology industries using a major international festival to reach global audiences at the same time, one through storytelling and one through consumer devices, both aimed at showing that professional-level filmmaking is becoming more accessible to ordinary creators.