A Cinema of Quiet Discomfort
Japanese director Sho Miyake has made the trip to North America, bringing with him two feature films that have been turning heads on the international festival circuit: Small, Slow But Steady and Two Seasons, Two Strangers. Together, they form a kind of loose diptych — naturalistic portraits of people straining toward one another across invisible distances.
If you haven't encountered Miyake's work yet, these two films are an ideal entry point. They share a sensibility that is difficult to pin down but easy to feel: unhurried, attentive, a little melancholy. His characters exist in a state of low-grade unease, the kind that doesn't announce itself with dramatic outbursts but accumulates quietly, like weather.
"I like these characters that have a sense of discomfort that slowly starts to distance them from society," Miyake told The Verge in a recent interview. It's a disarmingly simple statement that opens up into something vast when you sit with it — the idea that estrangement isn't always imposed from outside, but can grow from within, fed by temperament and circumstance.
Small, Slow But Steady
The first film centers on Keiko (Yukino Kishii), a deaf boxer navigating a sport — and a world — calibrated entirely for hearing people. It's an affectionate story, but not a sentimental one. Miyake resists the usual inspirational sports movie mechanics, opting instead for something more observational and searching.
The film made its North American debut at New Directors/New Films, the joint New York Film Society and MoMA program that has long been one of the best showcases for emerging international voices. Audiences there responded to the film's patience — its willingness to let Keiko's inner life unfold slowly, without shortcuts.
The boxing sequences are filmed with a tactile immediacy that is genuinely exciting, but they never feel like set pieces dropped into a quieter character study. Physical sensation and psychological texture are woven together throughout.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers
The second film takes a different shape but circles the same themes. Where Small, Slow But Steady follows one character's gradual drift from the world around her, Two Seasons, Two Strangers examines what happens when two people in that condition find each other — the relief of recognition, and the friction that follows.
Together, the films suggest a director deeply preoccupied with a question that doesn't have clean answers: how do we actually reach other people? How much of the distance between us is circumstance, and how much is simply who we are?
Why Miyake Matters
In an era when global cinema often gets reduced to genre spectacle or prestige melodrama, Miyake is doing something quieter and harder — making films that trust the audience to stay still long enough to feel something. His arrival on the North American scene is worth paying attention to.
Both films are screening now. If you have a taste for Japanese cinema in the tradition of Hirokazu Kore-eda or the early work of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Miyake belongs on your radar.
Source: The Verge
