All of a Sudden

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is among the most decorated filmmakers of his generation. Drive My Car (2021) won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and a Cannes screenplay prize, and Happy Hour and Evil Does Not Exist secured his standing. All of a Sudden (French title Soudain) is his first film made in France, a Japanese, French, Belgian and German co-production that premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize.

Adapted from a book by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono drawn from a real correspondence, it follows Marie-Lou Fontaine, who runs a nursing home in the Paris suburbs and insists, against her colleagues' resistance, on the tender "Humanitude" approach to care. Her encounter with Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright, changes how she sees her work and herself. Over 196 minutes and in two languages, Hamaguchi brings his long, conversational scenes to questions of dignity, attention and mortality. Samuel Andreyev wrote the score.

Cannes received it warmly, and it holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It carries the patient humanism of Drive My Car into a new national context with its maker's voice intact. A shared Best Actress prize for two performances in a largely French-language film by a Japanese director says a good deal about how little Hamaguchi's attentive, unhurried cinema depends on borders.