Author: Deborah Young

Gently engaging the viewer with whimsical tales of two couples and reflections on the artistic process, Shô Miyake’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner ‘Two Seasons, Two Strangers’ skillfully plays a wide range of chords from melancholy to amusing, tragic to poetic.

Nayra Ilic Garcia’s minimalist, somewhat impenetrable coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old Chilean girl, ‘Cuerpo Celeste’, is set during the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The life of a middle-class Spanish family is turned upside down when the 17-year-old daughter considers becoming a cloistered nun in Alauda Ruiz de Azua’s sly, funny and frequently moving ‘Sundays’.

A new-old take on a not very believable serial killer haunting Japan, ‘SAI Disaster’ emphasizes the ordinary, dull, problematic lives of his victims in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s unremarkable second collaboration.