Almost two decades after Zhang Yimou’s masterwork To Live, Chinese author Yu Hua’s prose returns to Cannes in a different mode through Wei Shujun’s Only The River Flows, the filmmaker’s third consecutive feature to premiere at Cannes since 2020. Eschewing the sweeping canvas of To Live for a mesmerizing, intractable noir, Only The River Flows centers on a mysterious murder in a riverside town, the lackadaisical bureaucracy surrounding the case, and the detective obsessed with solving the killing.

In 2013, filmmaker Anthony Chen’s first feature, Ilo Ilo, won the coveted Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Centered around the inseparable bond between a 10-year-old Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny, Chen’s full-length debut deployed a specific lens — a family weathering the 1997 Asian financial crisis — to tell a universal story exploring the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity. Flash forward to exactly a decade later, Chen makes his triumphant return to Cannes (in the Un Certain Regard section) with The Breaking Ice, a moving, humanist snapshot of China’s lost youths told through a ships-in-the-night friendship.