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Hamaguchi's All Of A Sudden Will Open the 2026 AFI European Union Film Showcase

Jonah VillalbaPublished 3m ago2 min readBased on 1 source
Hamaguchi's All Of A Sudden Will Open the 2026 AFI European Union Film Showcase
Photo by Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All Of A Sudden will open the 39th European Union Film Showcase at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, according to Deadline.

The showcase runs from 2 to 20 December 2026 at AFI's theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington. It is a film festival, a short run of movies shown together for a set period, and this year's programme includes 57 films from all 27 member states of the European Union.

The opening film is a French-language project for Hamaguchi, the Japanese director best known to many audiences for his earlier Japanese-language features. It stars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. Its two leads won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the award that Cannes gives to the year's top female performance. Japan has chosen the film as its entry for the Academy Awards, which is the country's official submission for Best International Feature Film.

That last category is worth a quick explanation. Each country picks one film a year to put forward for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, which used to be called Best Foreign Language Film. Only a shortlist of those entries goes on to compete for the statuette. The showcase includes 25 films that are contenders for that award, so audiences in the Washington area will have a chance to see several of the year's likely Oscar candidates in one place.

The showcase closes with Parallel Tales, the new film by Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director who has twice won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. Opening and closing a festival with films by directors of this standing sets a clear frame for the programme, and the rest of the 57 titles fill in the middle.

Festivals like this one are a useful window on European cinema. Many of the films in a showcase of this size have never had a wide release in the United States, so a single screening can be the first time an audience sees them. Tickets and full schedules are listed on AFI's website.

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