All of a Sudden

Best Actress, 2026 Cannes Film Festival
Japan submission for Best International Feature Film, 2027 Academy Awards
Official Selection, 2026 New York Film Festival

“Who are you, Marie-Lou?” asks Mari, on their first nocturnal walk-and-talk. From France, Marie-Lou travelled to Japan to study anthropology. Somehow she ended up as the director of a Parisian nursing home, where she is instituting a new care regiment called Humanitude, despite protests from her veteran caretakers.

“Who are you, Mari?” asks Marie-Lou later in their extended, stimulating conversation. From Japan, Mari moved to France to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. Philosophy led to theater directing, and she has a new show about mental institutions.

Mirror images across cultures and professions, Marie-Lou and Mari become natural interlocutors and quick friends. Within minutes of meeting, they are professional and spiritual soulmates. In Mari, Marie-Lou finds new insights into the ethics and economics of caretaking. In Marie-Lou, Mari finds someone who understands her own mortality as a cancer patient. Their conversations are breathtaking. Their code-switching has a tactility. As the days pass, and they return to the nursing home, they find that translating theory into practice is, above all, a kind of platonic eroticism.

As they debate the nature of care, and ask how caretaking can be more than an instrument to minimize corporate and social risk, Marie and Marie-Lou uncover the sensuous, and decidedly un-capitalistic, joy of spending excess time with each other—together, outside of work. Extended time is of course what director Ryusuke Hamaguchi does best, especially when it brings together film and theater, workshops and therapy. Building upon the five-hour Happy Hour (SDAFF ’15) and the three-hour Drive My Car (SDAFF ’21), ALL OF A SUDDEN unfolds as a melodramatic rumination on time: time cut short, time travel, a time to live and die, the extension of time to be together, and the spark of friendship that can manifest in an instant.

– Brian Hu