Still from Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025), by Shō Miyake.
Still from Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025), by Shō Miyake.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers
Directed by Shō Miyake (Japan, 2025, 89 min.). Japanese and Korean with English subtitles.
Winner of the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival, Shō Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers is a delicate meditation on how travel, language, and chance encounters shape the stories we tell. The film follows Li, a screenwriter searching for direction, whose everyday experiences gradually transform into words, images, and cinematic possibilities.
Inspired by Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga short stories “A View of the Seaside” and “Mr. Ben and His Igloo,” the film unfolds in two contrasting movements: a damp, windswept summer by the sea where two young strangers exchange tentative glances and halting conversation, and a quiet winter in a remote snowy inn where Li meets the enigmatic innkeeper Benzo. Across these mirrored seasons, Miyake crafts a quietly beguiling diptych about how lives are written, translated, and reimagined through cinema.
“Unfolding in a playful but deeply felt register … delivers the rare satisfaction of watching modest, thoughtful people find just what they need in the last place they’d expect it: in the small, slow, steady corners of the world which is where, Miyake Shō will convince you, all of life actually happens” —Sight and Sound
Wheelchair accessible
With English subtitles
Ticket Information
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