Vietnam's Filmmakers Shift AI From Crisis Fix to Production Tool
By @sharedot · · 7 pages
- Entertainment
- Film Industry
- Artificial Intelligence
- Vietnamese Cinema
Vietnamese film outlets report directors now choose AI for visuals and previsualisation, a turn the trade press frames as an industry-wide shift.
From Emergency Patch to Everyday Tool
Vietnam's film trade press is reporting a quiet reversal in how the country's cinema industry treats artificial intelligence.
According to VietNamNet and VietnamPlus, both running the VNA report "Vietnamese film industry joins AI race," AI first entered Vietnamese headlines as a crisis remedy: the 2025 "Chot Don" (Deal!) team swapped out its female lead's image to get the film into cinemas, and in September the "Mai No Mot Loi Tam Biet" (Chrysalis) crew used AI plus CGI to replace an actress caught in scandal.
The outlets now describe crews using the technology by choice rather than necessity.
A Wave of AI-Touched Releases
The surprise, as the two outlets present it, is how quickly choice replaced contingency. VietnamPlus and VietNamNet both report that in September TFS film studio and Ho Chi Minh City Radio and Television Station (HTV) unveiled "Bai San" (The Hunting Ground), billed as fully AI-produced visuals.
They also credit director Nguyen Quang Dung's animated "The Gioi Tran Trui" (The Naked World), which drew attention in early October for modern technology including AI in production, and note that "Ho Linh Trang Si: Bi An Mo Vua Dinh" (Spirit Guardians: The Last Secret of the First Emperor), released for the September 2 holiday, also carries an AI imprint.
Three AI-marked releases inside roughly two months is the kind of clustering the wire coverage treats as a genuine industry inflection.
AI as the Budget Line, Not the Star
VietNamNet and VietnamPlus both quote Nguyen Trong Khoa, Head of the Digital Film Production Faculty at RMIT University Vietnam, framing AI as a budget tool rather than a creative replacement.
In his account, it supports visual development, previsualisation, animation and visual effects — the resource-heavy stages where costs balloon — letting filmmakers test bold ideas, build worlds, create creatures and simulate action before committing to costly production.
Khoa adds that the payoff stretches beyond features, with advertising, brand storytelling, short films, music videos, pitch trailers and online series all positioned to benefit.
Regulators Draw the Line
Both outlets also report the state's response, and it is notably not a ban. According to the shared VNA reporting, Cinema Department Director Dang Tran Cuong says the answer is not to throttle new technology but to channel it — AI should expand human creativity, not replace human responsibility.
Cost cuts and faster workflows are welcome, he says, but creators and distributors still own the final product, and films remain bound by legal rules on content, classification, copyright and related rights, especially where children and minors are at risk.
The stance puts Vietnam's regulator in the pro-innovation-with-guardrails camp rather than the restrictionist one.
What Success Will Be Measured By
The closing note from both outlets belongs to Khoa, who argues success should not be measured by the degree of AI use, but by whether the technology improves storytelling quality, diversifies creativity and creates sustainable development opportunities for Vietnamese filmmakers.
For a market now openly racing peers on AI production, the metric that matters — per both VietNamNet and VietnamPlus — is story quality, not gadgetry.