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<\/p>\n\n\tTake 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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 \u2014 currently seen in the Chinese blockbuster Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, which is poised to become the country\u2019s biggest hit of the summer \u2014 and is based on a novella by acclaimed Chinese author Shuang Xuetao.<\/p>\n
\n\tSet 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\u2019s impossible ambition \u2014 to build a homemade flying jetpack \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tJiang Qiming in \u2018Take Off\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOrchard Tree Media<\/p>\n
\n\tShuang is a leading figure in China\u2019s wave of writers chronicling the decline of the country\u2019s industrial northeast. The Aeronaut, the novella that inspired Take Off was included in Shuang\u2019s 2022 story collection Rouge Street, which was named an \u201ceditors\u2019 choice\u201d by the New York Times. Shuang co-wrote the film\u2019s screenplay with Pengfei and Xu Yizhou, and served as an executive producer.<\/p>\n