Yi Wang

Yi Wang is a director from China. Reply's announcement of the ten finalists of the Reply AI Film Festival 2026 names Wang as the director of the short "Once Upon a Time on the Dnieper River", one of ten works chosen from more than 3,000 short films submitted from 76 countries.

The short is set in 2026 against the backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian front and follows a soldier stranded on the banks of the Dnieper River who is entrusted with a particularly sensitive and dangerous mission. Wang made it with Nano Banana for image generation and Dreamina and Vidu for video; the festival says the tools made it possible to create complex scenes of contemporary warfare and nuanced dialogue that would have been impossible to film given severe resource constraints.