Apple’s Chinese New Year short film, Glad I Met You (碰见你), continues its long-running tradition of Spring Festival storytelling shot entirely on iPhone. The film is directed by Bai Xue (白雪), best known for The Crossing, and was filmed fully on the iPhone 17 Pro.
The story marks a tonal shift from Apple’s earlier New Year narratives centred on family reunion. This time, the focus is on an accidental bond. The film follows an unremarkable office worker who reluctantly agrees to look after a colleague’s hamster. On her way, she encounters a lost dog, triggering a chain of small disasters: the hamster escapes, the dog confidently points her in the wrong direction, and everyday order dissolves into mild chaos.
It is only later that she realises the dog has been abandoned by its previous owner. In their shared isolation, the woman and the dog find comfort in each other, forming a relationship built on mutual healing rather than obligation.
Shooting Apple’s Chinese New Year film on iPhone
From a production standpoint, Apple continues to foreground technical capability through narrative rather than specification. According to the filming team, features such as 8x optical-quality zoom and low-light performance allowed the crew to capture wide, cinematic scenes using a mobile device. Notably, this is the first Lunar New Year film Apple has shot entirely on the Pro model rather than the Pro Max, reinforcing the Pro line’s positioning for mobile filmmaking.
Since debuting its first Lunar New Year short Three Minutes in 2018, Apple has made iPhone-shot Spring Festival films a fixed part of its China marketing calendar.
Notably, they are not the only brand to pivot away from family-centric storytelling or zodiac-rich imagery. What we’re seeing reflects broader changes in China’s marketing landscape, where emotional connections with a given audience increasingly sit alongside traditional ideas of reunion.
