In cold wintry Yanji, a city on China's northern border, young urbanite Haofeng, visiting from Shanghai, feels lost and adrift. By chance, he goes on a tour led by Nana, a charming tour guide who instantly fascinates him. She introduces him to Xiao, a personable but frustrated restaurant worker. The three bond quickly over a drunken weekend. Confronting their individual traumas, their frozen desires slowly thaw as they seek to liberate themselves from an icy world.
Ran dong, Un hiver à Yanji, A Fragilidade do Gelo, Ο πάγος που καίει, Przełamując lody, Iarnă Arzătoare, 연동, La fragilidad del hielo, 브레이킹 아이스, Ламаючи лід, 国境ナイトクルージング, La fragilitat del gel
France
Cannes Film Festival
Australia
Melbourne International Film Festival
Canada
Toronto International Film Festival
Brazil14
Poland
Hong Kong
Hong Kong Asian Film Festival
USA
Philadelphia Film Festival
India
Jio MAMI Film Festival
Indonesia21+
Jakarta Film Week
USA
Denver Film Festival
Greece
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Sweden
Taiwan
Philippines
QCinema International Film Festival
FinlandK-12
Helsinki Cine Aasia
South Korea12
Jeonju International Film Festival
USA
China
SingaporeM18
Hong Kong
France
Japan
China
USA
France
Australia
Brazil
Canada
China
Finland
France
Greece
Hong Kong
India
Indonesia
Japan
Philippines
Poland
Singapore
South Korea
Sweden
Taiwan
USA
Our generation is the generation that flirts with the idea of suicide. Almost everyone around my age moved places and left home before. We long for connection while isolating ourselves. Many times we end up feeling unwanted and lost sight of what to live for tomorrow.
I think that's also why we tend to celebrate more on random friendships, random day-trips, random hookups. Or random drink parties. That short moment of finding someone who understands us even if just a little bit. These moments can break our ice barriers and thaw our sadness a little may be to continue living for a few more days/months.
A sweet and shimmeringly beautiful film about how life can flow and then freeze and then thaw into something entirely new if you let it, Anthony Chen’s “The Breaking Ice” finds hope in the most frigid of places. In this case, that place is the small Chinese border city of Yanji during the depths of its endless winter, when people’s breath is as thick as the gray fumes that spew out of the factory smokestacks, and the snowy peak of Changbai Mountain looks closer to heaven than it does to Pyongyang. More than half a million people live there (many of them ethnic Koreans), but few of them seem to think of it as home. It’s as if they got…
The Breaking Ice is a confident work, a movie of unspoken dreams and youthful uncertainty. It captures those moments in youth where you don't know where to go next. Sometimes your life crosses with somebody else's and it forms memories that never fade. The Breaking Ice has a beautiful sense of place. Set in Yanji, a Chinese city near the Korean border, the film builds a lonely world for its three leads. They dance, they drink, they cry. The individual personal drama of the story is a bit cliché, but The Breaking Ice avoids dealing with its story directly. A lot is formed through ambiguity and characters keeping their problems silent. Whether they finally find worth in life is implied rather than stated. With some varied and distinctive shot choices, The Breaking Ice is very well made and carefully considered. It's an endearing tale of the struggles of young adulthood and I found it completely absorbing.
Um, Guys, Is That Freddy Fazbear?harharharharharharharharharhar
It's the kind of film where nothing serious really happens, just three people meet in a snowy ice maze aka Yanji, China, and begin to have some influence on each other, a simple story of mutual redemption. There are quite a few metaphorical scenes in the film, but I think there are a bit too many, and in some places, they don't feel cleverly integrated into the plot, but rather a bit forced.
Singapore's submission for the 2024 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.
we saw you from across the tour bus and we really like your vibe. do you want to join our suicide pact.
"Have you ever thought about ending it all?"
Indeed I have.
Haofeng and his ice cubes amid winter completely stole my heart. I could see so much of myself in his character.
Fresh out of Cannes and with Anthony Chen in attendance (accompanied by his adorable son), who spoke passionately about this film and shared his recent burst of filmmaking energy following the pandemic. You can tell because this one is a beauty. I was too star-struck to approach him and tell him what an honour seeing his beautiful film was (I will probably regret that later). Containing the cutest on-screen trio there ever was, I adored them and the movie. Their connection was so pure and sweet, and natural.…
He is just like me (missed his psychiatric appointments and cannot stop chewing ice)
A Bisexual Bear Sitting Still.
Nana, Haofeng, and Han Xiao, the People's Republic of China knows what y'all are.
< Ang Ranking: Best International Feature Film submissions to the 96th Academy Awards >
Anthony Chen created his version of Jules and Jim in a frozen Chinese small town, instead of his hometown of tropical, metropolitan Singapore. This is heavily style over substance, which is the opposite of Chen's usual approach. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't hold a candle to Ilo Ilo or Wet Season.
Three young people encounter in a Chinese tourist town near the border, and form a triangular bond that changes each other's life path. Against a beautiful yet melancholic backdrop of icy landscape, trauma run amok, and lonely souls fear being alone. It's a relatable situation, and Chen was honest with his quiet depiction of sentimentalism.
Acting wise the threesome cast showed enough charm and intimacy to allow the…
Replete with minutes of quietude, glances, unsaid interactions, and frozen landscapes, Chen's film paints both the arbitrariness and the sincerity of life- the despair and the radiance, whether it's fleeting or not, with equanimity. Rather than fully soothing the labyrinth of anguish, regrets, and obscurities, this film kindly disintegrates the walls between the empathetic souls; reflects the transience of life through those moments that we aim to hold onto when it seems evanescent, yet contended.
Amid all the generational angst and ambiguities, Chen has pictured all the deep-seated sadness, the loneliness, the itch of discontinuance, and also those sentiments seeking hope and realization in a distant, dubious world. Buoyed by the emotional maturity and subtle narrative, "The Breaking Ice" manifests the perceived sense of imperative vulnerability and exquisiteness of friendship relying more on sensitivity- elicits the heartache of its impermanence as well as the tranquility of its warmth and gravity.
