The Breaking Ice

Haofeng, visiting Yanji near the North Korean border from Shanghai for a wedding, misses his flight home. He spends three days with Nana, a tour guide, and her friend Xiao, who works in a restaurant. All three are stuck and none of them says so. Anthony Chen wrote and directed. The cast includes Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao. It was shot in winter and the climate is part of the telling: snow, ice and a frozen lake carry the characters' stasis directly. Yanji is a city in the northeast of China on the Korean border, and the mixture of language, food and population sits in the background. The film builds no love triangle; the closeness between the three stays undefined and it refuses to name it. Chen had won the Camera d'Or at Cannes with Ilo Ilo; the style here is looser. It played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2023. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet Chinese drama and stories of a younger generation. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for events; almost nothing happens across the three days.