A black cat, the loud chirring of cicadas and some bright summer landscapes, almost postcards. Almost paintings, you could say. And a sign: ‘Our town welcomes artists.’ 

The first few seconds of the film set the tone for Seaside Serendipity (Satoko Yokohama, 2025), a colourful mosaic of summer in a seaside town through its visitors and residents. Based on Gin Miyoshi’s manga ‘The Road to the Seaside’, this Japanese feature is a fun, tender and fresh reflection of art and what it means to be an artist. 

After being selected, among others, at the Generation Kplus section of the Berlinale, the TIFF Next Wave Film Festival and the Nara International Film Festival, where it won the Crystal SHIKA Award, Seaside Serendipity premieres in the UK at the MINT Chinese Film Festival, inside the ‘Asian Spark’ Feature Film Competition. 

It is a very hot summer in a small coastal town in Japan; the heat covers everything, makes everything slower, heavier, but also brighter. As visitors come and go, residents remain, sometimes the same, sometimes changed by the quirky guests who pass through. It is Sosuke and his friends, a group of local teenagers, who string the film together. 

These boys and girls have some summer projects for the school art club, and through their crafts, they start to discover a new side of life. Art can be a gateway to a new world, and maybe that means painting or sculpting breasts before they have even seen some in real life. They learn that you can’t hide what you are in art; it always ends up coming out in your work. They discover that art shouldn’t be a copy of life, but a mimesis, and each one does it their own way, because there are as many art forms as there are artists. 

Divided into chapters, Seaside Serendipity is a playful and tender film, with strong direction by Satoko Yokohama and good performances that round up well-written characters. Behind the intertwined anecdotes and the touch of magical realism, life seeps through, and with it, the burdens from which there is no escape. 

In this seaside town, it is these young boys and girls who seem to live truthfully, still free from cynicism. Often misunderstood by the adults, it is also they who are the real artists. One doesn’t have to be Picasso to subscribe to his famous quote: ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ 

Sosuke isn’t concerned about what happens to his creations; he just wants to keep creating. This film ponders what it means to be an artist – from the innocence of these child creators to the despair of adult artists in debt. Maybe it’s just about embracing curiosity and play, as the film itself does; maybe it means joining a silent dance when you see it happening in front of you, engineering a huge sculpture to try to get rid of a lurking animal, or dressing up as a dying woman’s late husband. 

As the summer season comes to an end – you can tell it is ending because the ‘lunch lady’ disappears from the coast overnight –  life begins to return to normal, whatever that may mean for each of the characters.

In the end, life is shaped by the eyes through which you see it, and as Sosuke’s friend says, all artists are self-proclaimed. Yet it is clear that being a child makes it easier to be an artist – it simply means being a child. And it is even easier to be an artist in the summer.