Since his first student short film _Story_ (2002) won the Outstanding Short Film Award at the Beijing Student Film Festival in 2002, Peng Tao (b. Beijing, 1974) has been widely acclaimed as one of the most highly regarded younger directors of low-budget independent movies in China today. His subsequent films, including _Floating in Memory_ (2009) and _The Cremator_ (2009), have been screened in many international film festivals, including the Yokohama, Vancouver and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, and have won several major awards. Peng's films are notable for their use of non-professional actors, unmodified street locations and natural lighting, documentary-style camera work and above all their deep concern for the plight of some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged people left far behind in China's competitive scramble for wealth, status and power. Many of the protagonists of Peng's films lead precarious or blighted lives in a kind of twilight world outside the bright circle of modern Chinese urban society, and their stoic endurance and largely unheeded suffering appears in stark contrast to the materialistic fantasies, shallow sentiments and inauthentic or contrived experiences so characteristic of much mainstream Chinese popular cinema.