Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, who shared the best actress prize at May’s Cannes Film Festival for their performances in Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s French-language debut All of a Sudden, will not be pitted against one another this awards season, The Hollywood Reporter has exclusively learned.
Neon, which will release All of a Sudden in the U.S. on Nov. 25, will push Efira, who plays the director of a Paris nursing home in the film, for best actress, and Okamoto, who plays a terminally-ill Japanese playwright, for best supporting actress.
The distributor, which has guided a considerable number of non-English-language films to major awards recognition, including Parasite, The Worst Person in the World and Anatomy of a Fall, will also campaign for All of a Sudden in picture, director and adapted screenplay categories. It remains to be seen if France or Japan will submit the film for the best international feature Oscar race.
Okamoto who became the first Japanese actress ever honored with Cannes’ best actress prize, just gave birth and is therefore less available to travel than Efira. Efira recently collected an honor at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland; made a swing through Los Angeles for screenings, tastemaker events and an intimate lunch with journalists; and will soon be headed to the Toronto and New York film festivals — the latter with Hamaguchi — to help launch the film in North America.
All of a Sudden opened in France on Aug. 12 and is significantly outperforming Hamaguchi’s two previous films that found international audiences, 2021’s Drive My Car, for which the filmmaker received a best director Oscar nomination, and 2023’s Evil Does Not Exist.
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