Take Off, a Chinese drama about a factory worker who spends his life chasing the dream of building a flying machine, will open in U.S. theaters on Sept. 17, courtesy of specialty distributor Orchid Tree Media.
The fourth feature from Chinese director Pengfei, the film recently made its North American premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival in July. It stars rising actor Jiang Qiming — currently seen in the Chinese blockbuster Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, which is poised to become the country’s biggest hit of the summer — and is based on a novella by acclaimed Chinese author Shuang Xuetao.
Set in the rust-belt cities of northeast China and spanning the 1970s to the present, the film follows Li Mingqi (Jiang), an ordinary laborer who inherits his late father’s impossible ambition — to build a homemade flying jetpack — but an early experiment goes wrong and leaves his brother-in-law disabled, shadowing the decades that follow. As the country opens up economically, Li and his wife (Li Xueqin) convert an abandoned factory into a dance hall and begin offering hot-air balloon rides to draw in tourists. But when his nephew falls gravely ill, Li straps on the homemade contraption one last time.
Shuang is a leading figure in China’s wave of writers chronicling the decline of the country’s industrial northeast. The Aeronaut, the novella that inspired Take Off was included in Shuang’s 2022 story collection Rouge Street, which was named an “editors’ choice” by the New York Times. Shuang co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Pengfei and Xu Yizhou, and served as an executive producer.
Take Off world premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October and opened in Chinese theaters in January, grossing $12 million (RMB 81 million).
Jiang, 33, has become one of the more closely watched actors of his generation in China since his breakout in the 2023 crime series The Long Season. He won best supporting actor at last year’s Shanghai Magnolia Awards for the television drama Escape From the Trilateral Slopes. The supporting cast includes Lei Jiayin (Article 20), Dong Zijian (My Friend An Delie) and veteran character actor Jiang Wu (To Live, Let the Bullets Fly).
Pengfei trained at the Institut International de l’Image et du Son in Paris and got his start under Tsai Ming-liang, serving as assistant director and co-writer on the Taiwanese master’s Stray Dogs, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 2013. Like his mentor, Pengfei has become a festival regular. His directorial debut Underground Fragrance and its follow-up The Taste of Rice Flower both played Venice Days, and 2020’s Tracing Her Shadow competed at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
Beijing-based sales agent Rediance, which handles the film internationally, brokered the deal with Orchid Tree.
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