Image: 'Soudain (All of a Sudden)' 2026, production still (c) CINEFRANCE STUDIOS / Julien Panie ; CINEFRANCE STUDIOS Julien Panié Medium 2 1
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's new film "Soudain (All of a Sudden)" receives its Queensland premiere at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane on Sunday 30 August 2026. The Australian Cinematheque presents the single screening at 1.30pm in Cinema A, admission free, with subtitles, and it is introduced by Robert Hughes of the Australian Cinematheque.
The film runs 195 minutes and is rated PG for mild themes. It shared the Best Actress award at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, given jointly to its leads Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. Adapted from the epistolary non-fiction book "You and I - The Illness Suddenly Get Worse" by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, it follows the friendship between Marie-Lou, who runs an aged care facility in Paris, and Mari, a terminally ill theatre director, as they talk about art, philosophy and their place in the world. Hamaguchi wrote the script with Lea Le Dimna; Alan Guichaoua shot it, and Yamazaki Azusa and Akimoto Minori edited. The gallery bills it as Hamaguchi's French-language debut; it is a France-Japan-Germany-Belgium co-production in French and Japanese with English subtitles, screening on DCP. The screening is presented by arrangement with Potential Films and Wonderfilm.
The premiere follows the comprehensive Hamaguchi retrospective the gallery staged as part of Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema in 2025, and the newsletter frames it as a coda to that focus.
It sits within the cinema program for 19 August to 2 September. "The Films of John Cassavetes" closes on 29 August, with his neo-noir "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" (1976) and his final film "Big Trouble" (1986), a comic reworking of Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity", among the last titles. Sam Peckinpah's "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974) is the month's Curator's Pick. From 2 to 6 September, "Collection Highlight: Kumar Shahani" screens four restoration prints of the Indian director's work, made through a preservation project the Australian Cinematheque began in 2003 and now held in the QAGOMA collection.
