Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025)

Sho Miyake | Japan | 2025 | 89 min | PG This film turns its gaze to scriptwriters, asking how lives are written, translated and transformed through cinema. This film takes inspiration from Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga A View of the Seaside (1967) and Mr. Ben and His Igloo (1968), unfolding first in a summer by the sea that feels curiously cold, then in the warmth of a remote winter inn. At its centre is Li, a scriptwriter searching for direction, whose practice reveals writing as a way of processing life. Ordinary encounters turn into words, feelings into text, and experiences into images, though always tinged with loss. The film dwells on the limits of language and translation, where silence and landscape speak instead. Sea and snow frame stories of solitude and strangers, resulting in a cinema that withstands loneliness while affording brief moments of belonging.