"The Return Flight" is about the most secret accounts of a generation of people who went abroad.
In 2006, Bi Pengfei boarded a plane to study in the United States with his red passport, I-20, the medicine and mustard that his parents stuffed into the box. He believes that the distance means freedom, future and a new beginning. But suddenly he found himself waking up on a flight from Seattle to Shanghai, only to find that he was no longer that young man: he had his wife, daughter, work meetings, American passport, and the news that his father had passed away on his phone.
In the next week, he kept waking up on his way back to China in different years: weddings, blind dates, medical records, quarantine, the Olympics, and farewells. Time unfolds out of sequence, but life reveals its true shape bit by bit. His father's "I'm fine", his mother's silence, his wife's fatigue, and his daughter's alienation were all considered "no way" by him, until he finally saw that the so-called success may also be a long-term absence.
This is not a story that persuades people to turn back. It does not simply deny the distance, nor does it write hometown as the only answer. It writes about the price people pay between time, family and self-choice: how we leave and how we come back; how we love a home but are always late.
"The Return Flight" is dedicated to anyone who has traveled far, is currently traveling, or has finally begun to understand what it means to "call when it's time to arrive."
Concept: What he travels through is not time, but the love that a man who has left his hometown has missed in twenty years.