India’s Impact Films has broadened its 2026 Cannes acquisition slate to include titles by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Asghar Farhadi, while also stepping into the Indonesian market for the first time.
Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s “All of a Sudden,” acquired from Cinefrance International and Japan’s Bitters End, is the auteur’s first French-language feature, about a care home director whose life is transformed by her friendship with a Japanese theater director fighting terminal cancer; it earned the best actress prize at Cannes for Virginie Efira and Okamoto Tao. Also on the slate is “La Bola Negra” (The Black Ball), acquired from Goodfellas, directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, whose queer epic traces the lives of three men across 1932, 1937, and 2017 through an unfinished Federico García Lorca manuscript; the film won the best director award at the festival and drew an extended standing ovation.
Kore-eda Hirokazu’s “Sheep in the Box,” acquired from Japan’s Gaga Corporation, is a near-future drama in which a grieving couple welcome a humanoid modeled after their dead son. Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales,” acquired from France’s Charades, follows a novelist in Paris who begins spying on neighbors across the street for material, until the fiction she constructs starts to overtake their actual lives. Léa Mysius’s “The Birthday Party,” acquired from MK2 Films, is a home-invasion thriller set in rural France in which a woman’s birthday celebration is turned violent by the arrival of dangerous figures from her past.
