Locarno Winner Sho Miyake Lands First North American Retrospective
Sho Miyake, whose Two Seasons, Two Strangers won the Golden Leopard, the top prize at Locarno, in 2025, will receive his first North American retrospective at New York's Metrograph from Nov. 7-17, Variety reported. He will attend in person over the opening weekend. The programme, titled Unspoken Gestures: The Films of Sho Miyake, is co-organised and presented by the Japan Foundation.
New York is one stop on a wider Japan Foundation tour covering 14 cities in eight countries. It opens on Nov. 3 in Washington, D.C., where the Japan Information & Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan will screen Two Seasons, Two Strangers. Miyake will join that Q&A remotely, the only tour city he will not visit in person.
The Metrograph edition brings together eight of Miyake's own titles, tracing his work from debut to latest prize-winner. His 2012 debut feature Playback, which premiered at Locarno, is in the line-up. So is The Cockpit (2014), a 64-minute film that observes producer-rapper OMSB and collaborator Bim making a track in a small suburban Tokyo apartment.
And Your Bird Can Sing (2018) screens with the 2016 short August 8th. Two Seasons, Two Strangers is paired with the 2016 short Nagahama. The bill also includes Small, Slow but Steady (2022), starring Yukino Kishii and drawn from the life of deaf boxer Keiko Ogasawara, and All the Long Nights (2024).
Miyake has also chosen two carte blanche titles, meaning personal picks from other directors, and he will introduce both on Nov. 8. They are David Elfick's 1973 surf film Crystal Voyager and Shinji Aoyama's 2007 drama Sad Vacation, starring Tadanobu Asano. The introductions follow Q&As after Small, Slow but Steady and Two Seasons, Two Strangers the day before.
After New York opens, the tour moves quickly. The Oklahoma stop runs Nov. 9-11 with screenings at the University of Oklahoma's Meacham Auditorium in Norman and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Los Angeles hosts the programme Nov. 13-15 across the Japan Foundation, Los Angeles, UCR Arts at the University of California, Riverside, and the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz Theatre, Variety reported. The Los Angeles line-up adds two more outside choices: King Vidor's The Patsy (1928) and Tony Scott's Deja Vu (2006).
Toronto runs Nov. 17-19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox, the Fox Theatre and Paradise Cinema. That bill includes Miyake's 2010 film Good for Nothing and Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1962). In the new year the tour heads to Paris, Toulouse, Rome, Turin, Madrid, Zurich, Cologne, London and Derby, and wraps in February 2027.
What makes this stand out is the scale. A full touring retrospective for a film-maker still building his North American audience is rare. For audiences, it means a chance to see the early shorts and features alongside the Locarno winner, with the director in the room.
