Peiqi Peng

Peiqi Peng is a Chinese director living in LA, with a BFA in Media Arts Production & Post-Colonial Studies from Emerson College and an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute. A child fantasy writer who later studied Sociology, Peng tells socially conscious female and queer stories through genre-bending forms, combining gore, fantasy, and absurdist elements with naturalistic sensibilities. Her recent short, A Roadside Banquet, went to a dozen Oscar-Qualifying film festivals, including the prestigious FIRST International Film Festival — often seen as the “Chinese Sundance” — and was broadcast on KCET/PBS. She was nominated at the YDA Awards, and her short was screened at the American Pavilion showcase at Cannes 2024. Before she became a director, Peng did script development work for FilmNation, Partizan, and Imagine Entertainment. She is a 2025 Film Independent Project Involve directing fellow. Director’s statement to be finalized. Shedding grew out of a desire to look directly at the quiet violence inside love — the way control can disguise itself as care, and how a body keeps the record of everything that cannot be said aloud. I wanted the camera to stay close enough to feel the heat of that intimacy, and the unease of it. Through a genre-bending language that lets horror and tenderness occupy the same frame, the film asks what a daughter must shed to become herself, and what a mother cannot let go. I hope the audience sits with that ache after the lights come up.