Brief Encounters

HO Miyake's lovely, wispy, rumination-like Japanese film, Tabi To Hibi (Two Seasons, Two Strangers), based on two of Yoshiharu Tsuge's mangas, Mr Ben and his Igloo and A View of the Seaside, is all about journeys we undertake through life, and into writing and filmmaking.

- Namrata Joshi

It also underscores how some of the most significant connections and the most compelling of our jottings can happen through or emerge from chance encounters with strangers—unexpected, casual, and fleeting.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers bagged the Golden Leopard at the recently concluded Locarno Film Festival, and it's not difficult to fathom why. Marked by Miyake's distinctive observational skills and compassion and warmth for the human condition, the narrative coasts along leisurely with rhythmic beats and elegant patterns, making for a most soulful, tactile piece of cinema. At the centre here is the Korean screenwriter Li Shim (Eun-kyung).

In the first segment, as she attempts to break free of the writer's block, and tie-in with the alien Japanese culture she is in, the narrative keeps alternating between her thoughts and writings and the story of two lonely Japanese youngsters, Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada) who meet and spend a day with each other by the sunny, but also cloudy, sea. It's their story that Li is struggling to give form on paper.