We were lucky to catch up with Peiqi Peng recently and have shared our conversation below.

Peiqi, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My recent experience working on my short A Roadside Banquet, was challenging but also extremely meaningful.

Peiqi, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a writer/director/producer that works both in narrative, personal short-form projects, and in commercial and branded longer formats.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been making and later promoting my latest work, a narrative short film called A Roadside Banquet. It’s a surrealist family drama about a girl who turns into a feather duster at her brother’s birthday party.

This story held great personal meaning for me as a key part of it was inspired by something that happened to me. There is a scene in the middle of the film, where the mother casually tells Mai how her father was so disappointed she was born a girl, that he couldn’t talk for an hour in the hospital. This scene is directly inspired by my own experience as a child.

Till this day I’m an only child, but when I was in elementary school, there was a year when my parents were seriously considering having another baby. I was very against the idea. One day at a restaurant, trying to convince me, my mom told me that the day she birthed me, essentially what the mom in the film said to the protagonist, that my father was so disappointed to find out I was a girl, he couldn’t talk for an hour. She said it casually, but I almost immediately came to tears, and it changed my relationship with my father forever.

I believed the weight of that moment can be translated to audiences of all backgrounds, and it turned out to be true — countless audiences of the film had come to us and talked about how impactful that moment in the film was. I was glad I could let a piece of my life becomes an inspiration for this story, and spark that type of emotional response from the audience.

What I also learned, which is crucial of being a filmmaker and a creative, is how your work can also be where you get to heal. We were very fortunate to screen this film at more than 30 film festivals now, and what surprised me was the amount of young Chinese women audiences that told me they heard the exact same things from their parents, about how their parents were disappointed that they birthed a girl. I thought it was a singular event that happened to me, but it seems more like generational trauma.

By contextualizing this moment from my life into my work, I got to desensitize, share it with people of similar experiences, and make peace with it.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Although we did not make this film thinking about how it will be received, it is always such an amazing experience seeing it connect with people. I believe being a creative and an artist is never about following other people’s path, but creating your own. The goal I envisioned for myself is this: creating universal stories that are emotionally accessible to a wide range of global audiences through unique, specific, and innovative storytelling formats that have never been achieved before. The most rewarding feeling for me is always sitting in a theater to see and hear how the audience connect with my film.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

To be innovative and to be someone who creates their own path, instead of repeating work that has been done before. Like many cinephiles of my generation, I started my dream of becoming a filmmaker when I was a kid, watching classics from the past and trying to envision my place in a world like the golden age of Hollywood. I did it by the book, went to film schools, and through that process, I did get closer and closer to the goal that I set up for myself, which is to work in the States in the entertainment industry where all the best storytellers and creatives around the world have gathered.

However, as I got closer and closer to that dream, I realized what would make me stand out was not to follow the story of the successful filmmakers of the past but to showcase my individuality. What makes a director and their work stand out from the rest won’t be something that was done exactly the same way a few decades ago. Fortunately, we live in a much more welcoming time, because the old Hollywood that I fantasized about when I was a child did not really have a place for people from marginalized groups like me.

Times and times again in the industry, we see new innovations, be it format, genre, thematic preferences or a shift of focus toward demographics that have previously been largely ignored. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring newer narrative formats. It is part of my effort to find those new paths that haven’t been taken. It is my lifelong goal to continue exploring, learning, and searching for ways to connect with a wide range of global audiences through new ways.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.peiqipeng.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pacificrimno1/