iQIYI's NadouPro rebuilds a 1938 film with no prints left

iQIYI says its AI platform NadouPro built a new version of "Visiting Shanghai after Sixty Years," a 1938 film with no surviving prints. The company announced the project in a press release dated November 6.

The result is a creative reconstruction, not a restoration. There was almost nothing left of it to repair. iQIYI says all prints, reels and scripts for the 1938 release were lost over the decades, and the team generated the film from production stills, posters and newspaper clippings used as guides. iQIYI's own restoration chief frames it that way. "With no surviving film prints to restore, we used AI to undertake a creative reconstruction of the film based on available historical materials," said Zidong Jiang, a member of the iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory and iQIYI's director of AI restoration technology.

NadouPro is iQIYI's production platform. iQIYI's product page describes a professional film and television tool run on a credit system, drawing on commercial and in-house models. Its manual lists close to 30 of them, among them Seedance 2.5 and Kling 3.0, alongside iQIYI's own IP and digital asset libraries.

An eight-person team at the iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory of Film Restoration finished the work in about two months, according to iQIYI. The company says it has worked on AI-assisted restoration since 2017 through ZoomAI, which handles scratch repair, super-resolution, noise reduction and frame interpolation, and that its laboratory with Xiamen University has returned a number of 4K classics.

Two problems shaped the build. iQIYI says it held character consistency by locking permanent digital assets for each character's features, proportions and costumes, then drawing every later shot from those files, and it controlled framing and movement with a 3D Director Studio. The 1938 scenes use early black-and-white cinema styling with stable cameras, while the 1998 scenes run documentary style, natural light and handheld.

iQIYI says the project was shortlisted for the "2026 Future Images AI Unit" at the 39th Golden Rooster Awards. No page independent of the company's announcement confirms the shortlist, so that claim rests on iQIYI's own release.

A creator can already rent Seedance 2.5 and Kling 3.0 elsewhere. What transfers from this project is the asset system that keeps one character recognizable across two eras of a film built without footage, and that workflow has been shown only inside a curated eight-person laboratory project.

The reconstructed film's release and screening details were not announced. NadouPro is at nadoupro.iqiyi.com.

Project card

• Film: "Visiting Shanghai after Sixty Years" (1938)
• Original status: Prints, reels and scripts lost
• Reconstruction: iQIYI, using NadouPro
• Team: iQIYI-XMU Joint Laboratory of Film Restoration, eight people
• Duration: About two months, per iQIYI
• Method: Generated from production stills, posters and newspaper clippings
• Award status: iQIYI says shortlisted for the 2026 Future Images AI Unit, 39th Golden Rooster Awards