Pengfei’s Rust-Belt Jetpack Fable Gets a U.S. Run

Li Mingqi has a hot-air balloon, a homemade jetpack, and the worst possible sense of when to quit. That makes him an unusually easy hero to root for in a movie about factory closures and middle age.

U.S. audiences can meet him on September 17, when Orchid Tree Media opens Take Off in theaters. Chinese director Pengfei’s comedy-drama follows one ordinary man trying to get airborne while the industrial northeast changes beneath him.

The film has already traveled through the Tokyo International Film Festival’s main competition and the New York Asian Film Festival, where it made its North American premiere in July. It also earned about RMB 81 million, or $12 million, after opening in China in January.

That is a modest result in China’s enormous theatrical market. It is also Pengfei’s biggest swing toward the crowd: after three festival-minded features, he wanted to make a warm, funny movie that could travel.

The factory floor becomes a dance floor

Take Off begins in the late 1970s and follows Li, played by Jiang Qiming, from factory life through China’s reform era and into middle age. His father’s dream of flight becomes his own, but an early experiment leaves his brother-in-law disabled and pushes the family toward a more earthbound survival plan.

Li and his wife, Yafeng, played by comedian and actor Li Xueqin, turn an abandoned factory space into a dance hall and offer balloon rides to pull in customers. Years later, a medical crisis sends Li back to the contraption he never stopped imagining.

The U.S. release still sells the joke immediately: Li sits beneath a roaring burner in a craft lashed together from wood, rope, tanks, and nerve. Around him, Northeast China’s state-owned employers are shedding the “iron rice bowl” promise of lifetime work, leaving whole cities to invent a second act.

Shuang Xuetao grew up around that aftershock in Shenyang and made it the emotional geography of The Aeronaut, the novella behind the film. English-language readers can find it in Jeremy Tiang’s translation of Rouge Street, a three-novella collection published in 2022.

Shuang co-wrote the screenplay with Pengfei and Xu Yizhou. They turn economic history into things a family can touch: a shuttered workshop becomes a dance floor, a balloon becomes advertising, and a pile of scrap becomes the dream Li cannot quite afford.

Pengfei wants more than the festival crowd

Pengfei came up working with Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and co-wrote Stray Dogs, which won Venice’s Grand Jury Prize in 2013. His own Underground Fragrance and The Taste of Rice Flower both played Venice Days, while Tracing Her Shadow competed at Shanghai.

That résumé usually points toward a careful festival release. Pengfei has been candid about wanting the opposite this time, telling Jiemian Entertainment in January that he deliberately made a commercial movie and still did not think it was commercial enough.

Take Off reaches for comedy, romance, spectacle, and a newly recognizable star at once. Jiang broke through in the acclaimed series The Long Season and now appears in the Chinese summer hit Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.

The U.S. date gives that bet another runway, though the practical details remain thin. Orchid Tree has not posted a city list or ticket links. The Los Angeles distributor previously opened Hong Kong drama A Light Never Goes Out in New York and Los Angeles, starting at Chinese-language audience hubs in Flushing and Monterey Park.

That history suggests where to watch first, but it does not guarantee the same route. A date without theaters is still an announcement, not a plan a reader can use.

Our read: Take Off has a better invitation than most two-hour industrial histories. Come for the man reckless enough to fly scrap metal; stay for Jiang Qiming, Li Xueqin, and Shuang Xuetao’s lived-in northeast.

Orchid Tree now has a month to tell audiences where that combination can land.