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

During his opening speech at the 2025 La Rochelle Fiction Festival, Gaëtan Bruel, president of the French National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), addressed 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 counterexample” of what a national screen culture should defend.

That reaction reveals a deeper confusion between a format and the commercial content that happened to accompany its first wave of international circulation. Judging a format by the earliest titles to travel is like judging cinema as a whole by its blockbusters.

Fear of change rather than a real debate

Duanju is neither an economic model nor a fixed aesthetic movement. It is a format, just like the short film, the series, or the feature. Ignoring it or dismissing it will not prevent it from becoming a social phenomenon. This kind of rejection says a lot about an industry that struggles to face the shifts in attention, viewing habits, and distribution.

Months earlier, Gaëtan Bruel had already spoken about the format in a fatalistic tone, referring to a “prescriptive effect coming from Asia” without imagining a creative response.

Instead of pitting models against each other, the better question is a creative one: how can duanju become a new showcase for storytelling, for authors, and for ideas across languages and markets?

Here, we choose to shed light on, analyze, and highlight the artistic forms emerging around this format, rather than stoking fears or discouraging the people who want to engage with it.

Article written by Guillaume Sanjorge

#GuillaumeSanjorge

#Duanjuphobia

Sources :

• CNC , September 19, 2025