Liu Baisha

Young urbanite, Haofeng, a charming tour guide, Nana, and a personable but frustrated restaurant worker, Xiao, all bond quickly over a drunken weekend in the cold wintry Yanji, a city on China's northern border. Confronting their individual traumas, their frozen desires slowly thaw as they seek to liberate themselves from an icy world.

Continuing the recent trend of moody neo-noirs from mainland China, this tenebrous psychological thriller from director Wei Shujun follows a small-town detective into the mouth of madness. Stunningly shot on Super 16, Only the River Flows is a pungently atmospheric serial-killer procedural.