PENG FEI [SONG]: TAKE OFF (2025)- NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVALA man who wanted to flyPeng Fei’s new film, which premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, follows a stubborn Northeast Chinese worker chasing his late father’s dream of flying, from the reform era’s dance halls to one final ascent. The setting is Jincheng, an old industrial city in Northeast China. Li Mingqi (Jiang Qiming) is the dreamer of flight, whose use of jet packs and balloons gets him fired from the factory, and he and his loyal and loving wife Gao Yafeng (Li Xueqin) and relatives start a dance hall in an abandoned factory space lent for cheap. Li uses his hot air balloon to promote the family business but he gives up pursuing his dream of flight. An early experiment that went wrong has disabled his brother-in-law, a tragedy that shadows everything after. This is a film about family with a crazy strain that runs through the generations.
Li Mingqi is a dreamer, and this is tale of dream and reality through the decades of China's economic miracle, starting in the 70's and running through the two subsequent decades. Likuan (played by Wu Jiang) is a World War II veteran and a key family figure whose life intersects with the family's changing fortunes. The cast also features actors like Dong Baoshi and Dong Zijian, who play integral roles in Li's family dynamic and his ambitious flight attempts. The film is a bit overlong and has some of the doggedness of its protagonist and it is heartwarming more than humorous. It's very much about love and family, and the director told
Variety in a review about
Take Off he feels it combines all the themes of his earlier films. It is also his first literary adaptation, being based on the eponymous novella by famous author Shuang Xuetao, a northeast writer of the "Dongbei Renaissance" in modern literature, focusing on the region's turbulent transition from a mid-century socialist industrial hub to an economically devastated rust belt in the 1990s.
Other directors have similar names. This is Peng Fei Song, whose work was unfamiliar to me. This is his fourth film, the other three being
Taste of Rice Flower (2017),
Tracing Her Shadow (2020) and
Underground Fragrance (2015). His works have debuted either at Tokyo or Venice. Those three all sound delicate;
Take Off is more of a boisterous, modest scale epic.
Peng Fei has a degree of European orientation: he graduated from the Institut International de l'Image et du Son (3IS) in France. He subsequently worked with Tsai Ming-liang, co-writing Tsai's Venice-winning film
Stray Dogs. But he also has a marshal arts background as a Wuxia athlete and stuntman. BaikuWiki has a
detailed description of the film production and the shoot over three seasons, summer for the 70's, with overexposed sunlight; autumn for the 80's, with warm and vibrant light; and winter for the 90's, for an austere quality.
This is not so evident in the viewing, but the final sequence is wintry. The protagonist is a reedy, wiry guy, sort of an everyman. As conceived in the story he is tall and seems light, thus flight-worthy. He abandons his amateurish flight devices and buries himself in work for the family at various jobs, starting with the dance hall. He also begins to smoke a lot and drink from a flask he carries. After many years, to raise money so Li's young nephew with a weak heart can get a pacemaker, he chooses to make a well-publicized dive from the highest tower, parachute, and land using multiple jet packs on a chosen target. This is a suspenseful sequence that has everyone watching on TV and is niftily staged, though highly implausible. The film meanders somewhat midway, but this final suspenseful action sequence pulls it together to some extent.
Take Off, Chinese title 飞行家 (Aviator), 118 mins., premiered Oct. 30, 2025 at Tokyo, opening in China Jan. 17, 2026, and shown at other festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF.
Showtime:
Fri, July 17
3:00 PM
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