Presented at the Cannes Film Festival, A Winter in Yanji takes you to the icy North of China to witness the meeting of three young adults with complex journeys… A touching, brilliant and warm odyssey that will warm your heart!
Portrait of a frozen youth
Haofeng (Liu Haoran), who works in finance in Shanghai, travels to the small town of Yanji to attend a wedding. Depressed and alone, the young man knowingly ignores telephone calls from his therapeutic center.
Shortly after his arrival, Haofeng meets Nana (Zhou Dongyu, recently seen in the film Better Days), a fascinating tour guide, and decides to join her group to discover the snowy region, located on the Korean border. The young woman introduces her to Xiao (Chuxiao Qu), her disillusioned cook friend, and the three form a strong friendship.
Like the melting snow, the unexpected meeting of these three young adults whose lives until then seemed frozen will warm their hearts and reveal their dreams, desires and secrets trapped in the ice…
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A marvel of poetry signed by a child from Cannes
Anthony Chen returned as a regular to the Cannes Film Festival this year to present his latest film, A Winter in Yanji. Congratulated with a special mention in 2007 for his short film Ah Ma, awarded the Caméra d’Or prize in 2013 for Ilo Ilo, the Singaporean director is one of the “children of Cannes”: a generation of talented filmmakers revealed at internationally through the prestigious festival.
This year he therefore made a triumphant return with great fanfare to familiar territory, despite the delicacy of his last feature film. Like a snowflake, A Winter in Yanji crystallizes the beauty of winter, the fragility of a fleeting human existence made up of silences and moments of stillness.
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The omnipresent ice is a metaphor for a young generation frozen, as if stuck in powder snow and incapable of seeing its future beyond the blizzard that hinders it. “When I decided to set the film in wintersays Anthony Chen, I thought we should make it a real winter film, and therefore go to the north, to one of the coldest places in China. […] A Winter in Yanji was born from a strong desire and a very spontaneous desire, after two years of confinement at home during the pandemic, where I went through a real existential crisis. […] I wanted to capture the spirit of the current generation of young Chinese people about whom I had heard a lot. […] It was a leap of faith for all of us. A wild adventure in a cold and freezing winter. And for me, a love letter to young Chinese.”
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By his terribly optimistic human warmth, which makes you want to grab hold of his characters and hug them with tenderness, A Winter in Yanji manages to make the spring sun shine in the darkness of the blizzard. A marvel of poetry and humanity, at the cinema from November 22.