A director reflects on filming in Kozushima and Yamagata, adapting Yoshiharu Tsuge, and inviting viewers to return to the world with fresh eyes
Sho Miyake’s film unfolds as a sequence of small encounters stitched together with a gentle formal logic. The movie opens with a Korean woman at a table drafting a scene on paper; that pencil stroke becomes the world we inhabit for a while. In the film we travel to a summer coastline and a winter lodge, encounter strangers who speak, walk and listen, and watch the filmmaker character present her own creation to an audience. This frame-within-frame device turns the act of storytelling into a visible motif and establishes the project’s interest in metanarrative—the idea of a story about stories.
Structurally concise yet emotionally accumulative, the film juxtaposes two short manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge—”A View of the Seaside” and “Mr. Ben and His Igloo”—and reimagines them as linked episodes that share themes of encounter and ephemerality. Miyake cast Shim Eun-kyung as the writer-presenter and placed Yuumi Kawai and Takada Mansaku at the center of the island sequence; a different pair populate the snowy segment. The result is a work that privileges quiet observationality: the significance of a gesture, the pause between lines, and the way a landscape can register memory.
Miyake says he was drawn to Tsuge’s short stories because they revolve around meetings between strangers and the brief intensity of those moments. Rather than force a seamless novelistic arc, he elected to let the two pieces breathe side by side, deliberately contrasting a sunlit island interlude with a cold, isolated winter. That decision produces a tonal counterpoint: the summer story leans into conversational roaming and the casual disclosures of travel, while the winter story tightens into silence, careful gestures and the slow thawing of reserve. This pairing is less a fusion than a conversation between seasons.
Location is central to the film’s texture. The island segment was shot on Kozushima, reachable from Tokyo only by boat and defined here by volcanic rock, blue backseats and open horizons; the winter sequences were filmed in Shōnai, Yamagata, where heavy snowfall reshapes movement and sound. Miyake describes his approach as partly premeditated and partly exploratory: some compositions were chosen before arrival, while others emerged through walking the land with the actors. That on-the-ground responsiveness reflects his broader commitment to collaborative filmmaking and to letting the environment inform performance.
Shooting on Kozushima allowed for improvisatory discovery: scenes were positioned to capture specific textures of light and sea, and actors were given room to react within those spaces. By contrast, the snowbound work in Shōnai required precise planning—footprints would have altered the frame—and so the team mapped shots and camera positions in advance. These differing production constraints shaped both the staging and the emotional tempo of each chapter, showing how location conditions can become creative parameters rather than mere backdrops.
color choices and framing emerged from a dialogue between Miyake and his cinematographer Yuta Tsukinaga, alongside art and costume departments who proposed strong visual ideas. The director emphasizes collaboration over prescriptive orders: he receives proposals and refines them with his team. Moments like a cliffside conversation at dusk illustrate this process—Miyake chose a longer shot that kept the sun and the figures in frame to register how physical reactions shift when faces are less visible. Such decisions foreground mise-en-scène as a tool for registering interpersonal change.
The film wears its influences lightly. Miyake cites Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu as formal inspirations for storytelling within stories, while naming directors across traditions—Éric Rohmer for vacation conversations, Hong Sangsoo for low-key relational drama, and Japanese masters like Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Hiroshi Shimizu for their handling of people in landscape. After winning the Golden Leopard at Locarno last year, the film continued on the festival circuit and played at Busan, where audiences responded warmly. Miyake also notes the film’s transnational cast—Shim Eun-kyung’s presence complicates neat definitions of national cinema.
Miyake’s ambitions are modest and precise: to leave viewers with a slightly altered perception of the world when they step back into their daily lives. He hopes the movie functions as a small recalibration, encouraging return visits to the cinema and fostering attention to the subtle ways people communicate—often trapped in a “cage of words,” as a line in the film describes. The director also spoke about his own process—walking to generate ideas, collaborating on scripts remotely, and relishing the communal joy of filmmaking. Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at Metrograph on Friday, April 24; it invites audiences to watch for the soft surprises of meeting, language and place.