A ROADSIDE BANQUET
an AFI Conservatory Thesis film
A day in 2016 China after the abolishment of One Child Policy, 11-year-old Mai attends her baby brother’s first birthday party and learns a crushing truth: her parents never ever wanted a girl.
What's worse: she starts turning into a feather duster.
The story
Mai is a cheerful 11-year-old who would make up silly songs with a feather duster in hand just to make people happy. During her little brother’s first birthday party, Mai’s light-hearted world is shaken, when she gradually realizes everyone at the party only has eyes for her baby brother.
Wanting not to be ignored, Mai follows her mother to the main table, but during their chit-chat, Mai’s mother reveals casually that the family always only wanted a boy. Devastated, Mai cries, when SHE SEES FEATHERS GROWING OUT OF HER BODY. Before she can do anything about it, a strange sensation takes over her body and turns Mai into a feather duster.
Later, the family gathers to play the game of ‘Grab’—whatever the baby picks out of a pile of objects will determine his future occupation—and the baby picks the feather duster. Mai reappears, but the baby boy is the only one in the room that can see her. Everyone laughs, takes the duster away and continues with the game. No one bothers to realize Mai is gone.
The Team
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Ziqi Gao
Producer
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Peiqi Peng
Writer/Director/Co-producer
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Tianyi Liu
Cinematographer
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Yara Wang
Production Designer
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EJ Li
Production Design
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Christine Ho
Editor
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. For a very long time in China under the One Child policy, families are banned to test the gender of their unborn baby, because many of them will take an abortion over having a girl as their only child. It was not just ‘my parents never wanted to have me’, it was also ‘I might not be born if they knew I was a girl’.
As the One Child policy loosens in China in the 2010s, many families choose to have another child. A lot of them had a teenaged daughter, and now they are having a son. This is the time period A Roadside Banquet is set in.
It’s a story about children who seek 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.