Two Seasons, Two Strangers

Free admission! The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Shō Miyake!

Winner of the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival, Shō Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers is a 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 narratives: 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.

About the filmmaker

Shō Miyake completed the elementary fiction course at the Film School of Tokyo and began making feature films soon after graduating from university. His film  Playback (2012) was selected for the Locarno International Competition, and And Your Bird Can Sing  (2018), Small, Slow But Steady  (2022), and All the Long Nights  (2024) were invited to the Berlin International Film Festival. His latest, Two Seasons, Two Strangers  (2025) won the Golden Leopard, the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

This screening is part of Unspoken Gestures: A Shō Miyake Retrospective organized in conjunction with the The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles.

Additional support for this screening comes from the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside and Asian Studies at UC Riverside