Peng PeiQi
Peng Peiqi is a Chinese writer/director living in Los Angeles, with a BFA in Film & Post-Colonial Studies from Emerson College and an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute. A child fantasy writer that later studied Sociology, Peiqi does socially conscious female dramas with fantasy, gore, and absurdist elements. Her narrative shorts have been screened at many festivals, including Cleveland International Film Festival, Chinese American Film Festival, and L.A. Shorts. A semi-finalist in the ScreenCraft Film Fund Competition, Peiqi did script development work for FilmNation, Partizan, and Imagine Entertainment.
Director's statement
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, my father was so disappointed to find out I was a girl, he couldn’t talk for an hour. She said it ever so casually, but I almost immediately came to tears, and it changed my relationship with my father forever. A Roadside Banquet is a story about every child who seeks the unconditional love that their parents can no longer give. Underneath the joyfulness of the banquet and the magical realistic twist of the duster is a story about being a girl — and sometimes, being overlooked, sidelined and silenced. Minimized into a supporting role, into domesticity, into something as unremarkable as a feather duster.
