I watched All of a Sudden, the new film from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, at the Sydney Film Festival this weekend, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
On paper, it’s a film about aged care, especially for people with dementia. It follows Marie-Lou, the director of a nursing home in Paris, who is trying to bring a care philosophy called Humanitude into a system that doesn’t always leave room for it. Humanitude is built on simple, almost old-fashioned ideas: look people in the eye, speak gently, use touch with permission, help someone stand and walk rather than doing everything for them, and give care enough time to actually be care. It sounds obvious. The quiet shock of the film is realising how rarely those things happen.
A film about ageing — and not only about ageing
What struck me most wasn’t the nursing-home setting. It was a thread running quietly underneath it. Early on, Marie-Lou notices a young man with ASD running on the street, and she simply waits with him until his family arrives. In that small moment the film makes a point we believe in deeply: care doesn’t belong to one age or one diagnosis. Dignity is dignity.
The needs of an older person living with dementia and a younger person living with disability rhyme far more than our systems like to admit. And most of us will need care of some kind, at some point. It isn’t “them”. It’s us, eventually.
When kindness starts to look like “too much”
There’s an idea in the film I keep returning to. The staff who push back against Marie-Lou aren’t cruel — they’re tired, under-resourced, and trained by a system that treats speed as the goal and tenderness as a luxury. The film gently turns that on its head. Perhaps basic kindness only looks excessive because we’ve grown used to so little of it.
That lands very close to the work we do.
When we talk about person-centred support at Journey In Action Support, this is exactly what we mean. Not a checklist rushed through as quickly as possible, but support shaped around the actual person in front of us — their routine, their sensory needs, their language, their pace. It’s why we keep the same worker where we can, why we don’t fill a quiet home with strong fragrances or noise, and why we treat a predictable routine as part of the core care, rather than a nice extra. You can see that thinking in how we approach personal care and daily support, and in the way we help people get out into the community at their own pace rather than on a stopwatch.
The languages we think in
One of the quiet wonders of the film is how its two main characters (Marie-Lou and Mari) move between French and Japanese, slipping from one language to the other mid-conversation. Hamaguchi has always been fascinated by language — anyone who saw his earlier film Drive My Car will remember its multilingual rehearsals, where actors performed Chekhov across Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and even sign language, understanding one another less through literal translation than through patience and attention.
What he keeps showing us is that language isn’t just a tool for passing information back and forth. The language we speak shapes how we say things, what we notice, even how we feel. Many bilingual people will tell you they’re a slightly different person in each of their languages — warmer in one, more precise in another, or able to name a feeling in their mother tongue that has no real equal anywhere else. To be cared for in the language you think in, then, isn’t a convenience. It’s to be met as yourself.
That’s why, for many of the families we work with, person-centred support begins with language. So much of good support is simply communication — and communication only truly works when a person can speak, and be heard, in the language they think and feel in. Being a bilingual Mandarin and English service isn’t a marketing line for us; it’s part of meeting people where they are.
The takeaway
All of a Sudden is a very slow, and long film, and asks for your patience. But it leaves you holding onto something simple: that meeting a person where they are — taking the time to understand them, even when it’s inconvenient — is not too much to ask. It’s the whole point of care.
If you or someone you love is navigating the NDIS and looking for support that starts with the person rather than the task, we’d be glad to have a conversation.
Feng is the founder of Journey In Action Support, an NDIS provider based in Sydney’s Lower North Shore. With a Certificate III in Individual Support, Feng supports participants across household tasks, personal care, transport, and community access — with a bilingual Mandarin and English service that reflects the needs of the local Chinese-Australian community.
