With breathtaking visual poetry and emotional depth, Lamp by Zoe Peng has been awarded Best Narrative Short (Grand Jury Prize) of the Summer 2025 season at Cal Film Festival.
Originally created as the central interlude VCR for singer Angela Zhang’s 2025 Seeking Light world tour, Lamp reaches far beyond its concert-film origins. It unfolds as a mesmerizing cinematic fable—a space where stagecraft meets storytelling and spectacle gives way to soul.
A Journey Through the Light and the Infinite
When Angela Zhang finds herself physically and emotionally spent, a mysterious lamp appears—offering three wishes. What begins as a simple act of hope grows into an odyssey through realms where time bends, memories breathe, and illusion quietly becomes truth.
She moves through gilded illusions of desire, storms the Archives of Love to unearth forgotten doctrines of heartbreak, and at last stands before her aged self at the end of time, in a house built from crystallized memories.
In that luminous twilight, two versions of Angela share a conversation about home, art, aging, and the weight of creation. Their words flicker between melancholy and revelation. As the lamp’s glow fades, she realizes something tender and astonishing—there are no miracles, only the quiet constellations formed by ordinary human kindness.
The Art of Lingering Resonance
For filmmaker Zoe Peng, Lamp was never meant to be just a film. She calls it an experiment in how emotion lingers long after the screen goes dark. Her direction blends intimate cinematics with monumental stage design, turning a 75-meter, wave-shaped LED monolith into a living canvas of memory and light.
“Every decision served the story’s soul rather than its spectacle,” Peng reflects. “We sought lingering resonance—the afterglow audiences carry long after leaving the theater.”
Across its sweeping images, Lamp captures the poetry of perseverance: a student buried in textbooks; a character actor smeared with oil before a small scene; a delivery rider pedaling through midnight frost. Each becomes a point of light in Peng’s constellation of empathy—proof that technology, when guided by heart, can amplify tenderness rather than overshadow it.
Known for her imaginative visual language and her instinctive grasp of the contemporary spirit, Peng turns bold ideas into emotionally charged narratives. Her work balances innovation with introspection, resting at the crossroads of fine art, cinema, and live performance.
Crafting the Impossible
With a budget of ¥2,600,000 CNY (approximately $357,000 USD), Lamp stands as a testament to what happens when artistry and engineering converge. Born from the creative partnership behind Angela Zhang’s “Seeking Light” tour, it reimagines what a concert narrative can be—an immersive bridge between audience and performer, dream and daylight.
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