There is something quietly radical about a filmmaker who worked in Silicon Valley, ran operations for Alibaba and TripAdvisor, and then turned the camera on the industry he helped build. Hao Wu has spent the better part of a decade doing exactly that, and with TikTok Never Dies, his latest documentary premiering at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, he arrives at something that feels less like a tech story and more like a mirror held up to the moment we are all living in.
Photo: Jesse Rylander
I sat down with Wu over a Zoom call ahead of his Tribeca screenings, and from the first exchange, it was clear he is not interested in the surface-level TikTok debate. Not the geopolitics. Not the dance trends. Not the national security soundbites. What Wu is after is harder to name and more enduring: the question of who controls the spaces where creative people live and work.
A Story That Kept Rewriting Itself
Wu did not begin his career as a filmmaker. Before picking up a camera, he was a molecular biologist, then a product manager in Silicon Valley, then a general manager helping TripAdvisor build its China office. That unusual biography is not just biographical color. It is the engine driving his editorial instincts.
“Right around 2018, I started paying attention to TikTok,” he told me. “It became really popular in the US in 2019 and 2020. And I had always wanted to make a film about TikTok, but I didn’t want to do another influencer film or a purely talking-head geopolitics debate.”
The angle he had been waiting for arrived in May 2024, when a group of TikTok content creators filed suit against the US government to challenge legislation that could force the platform to shut down. Wu recognized it immediately for what it was: a legal saga with the structural tension of a three-act film. “It’s going to the Supreme Court,” he thought. “There will be suspense. There will be a dramatic arc.”
What he did not anticipate was that the Supreme Court would issue its ruling in ten days rather than six months. Or that the platform would briefly go dark. Or that Donald Trump would spend political capital trying to save it. The story kept rewriting itself, and Wu kept adapting his outline.
“The final film definitely comes in the edit room,” he said, with the matter-of-fact calm of someone who edits his own work and has learned to trust the chaos.
Vertical Videos in a Horizontal World
For the Motionographer community, there is a specific question buried in TikTok Never Dies that is worth bringing to light: what happens when your subjects are themselves professional image-makers, and the medium they work in is fundamentally at odds with the medium you work in?
Courtesy of TikTok Never Dies
TikTok is vertical. Cinema is horizontal. The creators Wu followed build entire visual identities inside a 9:16 frame. Presenting their work inside a documentary meant solving a design problem that has no clean answer.
“It really made us spend a lot of time thinking through which TikTok videos to include, and how we present vertical videos in a fundamentally horizontal film environment,” Wu said.
His solution was not technical but curatorial. Rather than forcing TikTok content into the wider frame, the film preserves its native verticality and uses it as a visual signature. The motion graphics and animation sequences in the film were built around that tension, helping translate the kinetic language of the platform into a theatrical experience without flattening what made it feel alive.
Wu’s motion graphics designer, Alex, described Motionographer as “a very famous publication for graphics artists” before the interview began, which suggests the community’s fingerprints are already on the film. And watching how Wu talks about the aesthetic decisions, it is clear he sees visual language not as packaging but as argument.
The Fragility of Building on Borrowed Ground
There is a generation of animators, motion designers, and visual artists for whom TikTok and Instagram are not just distribution channels. They are studios. They are galleries. They are the entire discovery pipeline.
Courtesy of TikTok Never Dies
TikTok Never Dies asks a pointed question to that generation: what does it mean to build something on a platform you do not own?
“I want content creators to think more about the platform they depend on for their livelihoods,” Wu said, “and what are the forces controlling those platforms.”
In The People’s Republic of Desire, his 2018 documentary about China’s live-streaming culture, Wu examined the economic forces shaping what creators could say and make. TikTok Never Dies scales those concerns up considerably. Now it is not just market forces. It is geopolitical rivalry, legislative power, and the concentrated ambitions of individual billionaires.
“With TikTok, there are powers beyond typical market forces,” he said. “Political power, geopolitical forces that can control it. And as content creators ourselves, we need to be educated about this. We need to be more engaged, because our livelihoods depend on that.”
The word “ourselves” is not accidental. Wu includes himself in that group. He had barely used TikTok before production began. By the end of it, he was licensing the TikTok Baby song for the final cut because he had listened to it so many times it felt like memory.
The Same Human Story, Different Servers
One of the more quietly profound moments in my conversation with Wu came when I asked whether he sees the internet as fundamentally different across cultures, or whether it is always the same human story running on different infrastructure.
Courtesy of TikTok Never Dies
“Whatever culture, internet or offline celebrity culture, it’s fundamentally about human desires,” he said. “Our desire for money, recognition, status, and human connection. In that regard, it’s not that different across cultures.”
For a filmmaker who has made work in China, in Wuhan during the early days of COVID, and now in the middle of America’s most contentious social media debate, that perspective carries real weight. Wu is not making films about technology. He is making films about people who happen to be living inside technological systems, trying to find meaning, income, and a voice.
That is a story motion designers know intimately. The platforms change. The compression formats change. The aspect ratios change. But the desire to make something and have it seen by someone who needed to see it? That stays the same.
Why This Film Is for You
Courtesy of TikTok Never Dies
Wu was direct about who he made TikTok Never Dies for. “I want people to appreciate that each social media platform is unique. Regulation is necessary, but we also need to be careful that the regulation effort itself isn’t hijacked by outside powers or outside interests.”
He also deliberately chose to make the film fun. Knowing the subject matter was skewed intellectually, he seeded it with TikTok trends, absurdist humor, and raw emotional footage of creators watching their platform go dark. He wanted the film to do what good documentary work at its best always does: give you the experience of living inside a story you only thought you understood from the outside.
For anyone in the Motionographer community who has ever built an audience on someone else’s platform, watched an algorithm reshuffle everything overnight, or wondered what it means to create in a space you do not control, this film is not just timely. It is necessary.
Words: Jesse Rylander
Film: TikTok Never Dies
Director: Hao Wu
Festival: 2026 Tribeca Festival
Website: tribecafilm.com