Directed by Sho Miyake
With his latest work, the minimalistic but structurally layered "Two Seasons, Two Strangers", having won the top prize at Locarno in 2025, Sho Miyake is making a name for himself as one of Japan’s leading contemporary filmmakers alongside Ryusuke Hamaguchi—who, incidentally, has long been a fan of Miyake’s. Metrograph At Home brings together his first two features, "Good for Nothing" (2010) and "Playback" (2012), both black-and-white studies in poignant but playful listlessness, the former about a trio of high school students, the latter about an actor on the verge of middle age, with "Wild Tour" (2019), his low-key tale of a love triangle blooming at a botanical workshop. Presented alongside these films is a suite of Miyake’s lyrical video diaries, spanning 2014–2018.
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Playback
Directed by Sho Miyake | 113 mins | 2012
With a perceptiveness beyond his years, Miyake moved from the adolescent unquiet of his feature debut, "Good for Nothing" (2010), to the unquiet of looming middle-age in his follow up. Soon to be divorced and almost 40, Haji (Jun Murakami), an actor, takes... -
Good for Nothing
Directed by Sho Miyake | 76 mins | 2012
Like his 2025 Locarno Golden Leopard-winner, "Two Seasons, Two Strangers", Miyake’s melancholic feature debut—whose admirers include, notably, Ryusuke Hamaguchi—pairs untrammelled snowy landscapes with a kind of restless disaffection. In the director’s nati... -
Diary Without Words 2014
Directed by Sho Miyake | 66 mins | 2014
The first of Miyake’s video diaries opens, fittingly enough, in a cinema. But this 2014 diary suggests a filmmaker more often in transit than at rest, offering glimpses of numerous train and plane trips, as well as the people and creatures observed along th... -
Diary Without Words 2015
Directed by Sho Miyake | 67 mins | 2015
A cat nestles in a busted traffic cone, a pizza cutter divides a glistening pie, a pigeon outside the Centre Pompidou approaches the camera inquisitively: Miyake’s second video diary arranges micro-scenes into a sensory cascade. -
Diary Without Words 2016
Directed by Sho Miyake | 50 mins | 2016
Revealing a practice matured, the third installment in Miyake’s video diary series feels a little more playful, more exploratory, in its camera movements. -
Diary Without Words 2018
Directed by Sho Miyake | 60 mins | 2018
Catching sight of his shadow, the filmmaker holds his phone aloft and waves at himself. The final video diary assembled by Miyake tends towards a more explicitly embodied stance than previously—an intimation of the “I” behind the camera. -
Wild Tour
Directed by Shō Miyake | 67 mins | 2019
A gentle but spirited work in a neorealist vein, "Wild Tour" begins as a portrait of an experimental workshop run by the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media through which participants collect and analyze the DNA of local plant samples. From there, director ...
