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.
Every winter, Harbin rebuilds itself from blocks of ice. Beneath the annual cycle of constructing and dismantling the city’s ice and snow spectacles, history quietly resurfaces.
Guided by the voice of a traveler, the film drifts through contemporary Harbin, where fragments of different eras emerge within the city’s seasonal cycle of ice and snow construction. We encounter the ghosts of Ahn Jung-geun on his way to assassinate Itō Hirobumi; Yoshiko, caught in the uncertainty of her own identity; a young university couple uncertain about their future; intelligence agents navigating between competing political forces; and laid-off factory workers unwilling to leave the factories that once defined their lives. Finally, a museum guide tirelessly repeats an official version of history, believing she is reassembling fragments of the past, only to become another fragment within the narrative herself. Rather than simply reconstructing historical events, this hybrid documentary uses contemporary reality to evoke historical imagination, gradually dissolving the boundaries between past and present, documentary observation and staged performance.
Like the ice sculptures, Harbin itself has been repeatedly built, demolished, and reshaped. What remains after a city has been continually reconstructed by ideology, political power, and personal memory? And where might the city 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.