Me llamo Peng

Peng, a Chinese immigrant to Europe, set up his camera over six years in his workplaces (often restaurant kitchens). Drawing on sixty hours of his filmed diary, Jahel Guerra Roa and Victoria Molina de Carranza show the hardships of a nomadic life due to unemployment (“I’ll go anywhere I’m needed”). The amateur filmmaker’s insistence on not putting down his camera even if he has nothing to say is moving. “Colleagues in France would say: in your first year away from China, your remarks are optimistic, in the second, you talk to yourself, and in the third, you can’t even find your words.” In a solitude that is increasingly absolute, the ritual of DV seems to be for him the only witness to his existence.

Charlotte Garson