A traveler drifts through Harbin, where “ghosts” from different eras wander amid the endless cycle of ice and snow construction, searching for a place in a city constantly being rewritten.
This hybrid documentary explores Harbin through a non-linear journey guided by a drifting, time-traveling voice. Rather than reconstructing history chronologically, the film moves through the contemporary city, where traces of past political powers and economic systems remain embedded in everyday urban spaces.
From Russian colonial ambitions and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria to socialist industrialisation and today’s tourism-driven redevelopment, Harbin has been shaped by repeated cycles of construction, collapse, and reinvention. Demolitions, abandoned factories, construction sites, and the annual building and dismantling of the Ice and Snow World form a visible rhythm of making and unmaking.
Ghost-like figures inspired by different historical periods, such as a Russian émigré aristocrat, a Soviet soldier, or a Japanese-era actress, appear within present-day Harbin, performing ordinary actions as fragments of the past drift through the contemporary city.
Through multilingual voices and staged encounters, the film reflects on what remains after a city has been repeatedly shaped by ideology, power, and spectacle, and asks where the city might be heading.
Yanqi Chen, director, writer and sometimes editor, was born in Harbin, China. After graduating from London Film School in 2016, he went back to China and started to work on his first feature film named Day Tripper, which has been selected by the 39th Warsaw International Film Festival, the 7th Pingyao International Film Festival in 2023, and has won the Grand Prix of the 38th Fribourg International Film Festival in 2024.
Huihui Lou is the founder of French production company Oui Production. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and holds a Master’s degree in directing, producing, and screenwriting from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work centers on intimate, cross-cultural narratives that examine identity, migration, and memory across both fiction and documentary forms. She is an IDFAcademy alumna and a selected participant in the Berlinale EFM Toolbox Program 2026.