Duanjuphobia: when Gaëtan Bruel, president of the CNC, confuses the format and its use

In his opening address at the 2025 La Rochelle Fiction Festival in France, Gaëtan Bruel, president of the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), chose to discuss the phenomenon of micro-dramas, better known in China as Duanju. Rather than seeing it as the emergence of a new audiovisual language, he described it as "the perfect counter-example" of what France should be championing. This reticence reflects a profound confusion between a format and the commercial content that accompanied its initial wave of exports. Judging a format based on the first series from Asia is tantamount to judging all of cinema based on its blockbusters.

A fear of change rather than a substantive debate

Duanju is neither an economic model nor a fixed aesthetic movement: it's a format, just like short films, series, or feature films. Ignoring or dismissing it won't prevent it from establishing itself as a social phenomenon. This rejection speaks volumes about the inertia of an industry struggling to confront the shifts in attention spans and viewing habits. Just a few months earlier, Gaëtan Bruel had already addressed the format in a fatalistic tone, referring to a "prescriptive effect from Asia" without envisioning any French counter-offensive.

Rather than pitting models against each other, we should now consider a creative response: how can we make Duanju a new showcase for Francophone creativity, its authors and its ideas? This is precisely the mission that Duanju.news has set for itself: to illuminate, analyze and highlight the artistic forms that emerge around this format and which, far from reducing it to an industrial product, make it a breeding ground for innovation.

Article written by Guillaume Sanjorge

#GuillaumeSanjorge

#Duanjuphobia

Sources :

• CNC , September 19, 2025