Zheng Bao

Yifei Li is a filmmaker working in China who, with Yifei Li, made the short film Plastic Erosion. The film won first place at the AI for Good Film Festival 2026, announced at the awards ceremony of the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, the film strand of a summit organised by the International Telecommunication Union. The festival drew more than 1,300 submissions and narrowed them to ten finalists in ten countries.

Plastic Erosion takes on marine plastic pollution by making it tangible: a fisherman brings in a catch of fish made of plastic, and the fish travel through a market, a restaurant and a kitchen onto a plate. The directors, Zheng Bao and Yifei Li, say their starting question was whether discarded plastic ever truly disappears, and wrote in their submission that there is no away when it comes to plastic waste. They designed the images to look attractive at first glance and disturbing on second, using an AI production pipeline to make the paradox visible.