Japan Sends Hamaguchi's 'All of a Sudden' to the Oscars
Japan has selected Ryusuke Hamaguchi's French-language film All of a Sudden as its submission for the Best International Feature category at the 99th Academy Awards, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, known as Eiren, announced on 26 August 2026 (The Hollywood Reporter).
It is the second time a Hamaguchi film has carried Japan's hopes in the category. His 2021 feature Drive My Car won the Best International Feature Oscar and also earned nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay — a rare sweep across categories for a Japanese production (The Hollywood Reporter).
All of a Sudden premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where co-stars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the best actress prize. Okamoto became the first Japanese actress to receive that honour from the Cannes jury (The Hollywood Reporter).
The film runs three hours and sixteen minutes. It is set largely at a nursing home outside Paris. Efira plays Marie-Lou, the facility's director, who tries to introduce a compassion-based approach to elder care amid chronic understaffing. Okamoto plays Mari, a Japanese theatre director with terminal cancer who forms an intense friendship with Marie-Lou (The Hollywood Reporter).
Hamaguchi co-wrote the screenplay with Léa Le Dimna, loosely adapting When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn, a best-selling Japanese nonfiction collection of letters between philosopher Makiko Miyano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono. The film is a France-Japan-Germany-Belgium co-production (The Hollywood Reporter).
Neon, the independent distributor behind recent Oscar contenders, will release All of a Sudden in the United States on 25 November — squarely inside the awards-corridor window when studios platform prestige titles. The company plans to campaign across multiple categories: Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress for Efira, and Best Supporting Actress for Okamoto (The Hollywood Reporter).
What makes this stand out is the breadth of that campaign. A film submitted for International Feature rarely gets a parallel push in the top general categories — the Best Picture and Director races — because voters and distributors tend to treat the two tracks separately. Drive My Car proved a Japanese-language film could cross over. Now Neon is betting that a Japanese-directed, French-language film set in France can do the same.
Hamaguchi's festival résumae gives the campaign a foundation. He won the screenplay prize at Cannes for Drive My Car, the Silver Bear grand jury prize at Berlin for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy in 2021, and Venice's grand jury prize for Evil Does Not Exist in 2023 — recognition across three of Europe's major festivals (The Hollywood Reporter).
The 99th Academy Awards will be held on 14 March 2027.
