In Waves

AJ is at high school in Los Angeles. He skates and he draws; in a crowd he does not talk. Kristen surfs. The two meet and AJ gets into the water. Kristen teaches him. Then Kristen falls ill. The treatment begins and it goes on a long time. AJ stays with her. The narrative runs on two lines: on one side this relationship, on the other the history of surfing itself; how the board was made, who first went into the sea, and what the water has meant to people. Phuong Mai Nguyen directs; it is her first feature. Rio Vega, Lyna Khoudri, Paul Kircher and Birane Ba are among the voices. It is a French production and animated. The source is AJ Dungo's graphic novel, published in 2019; the book rests on his own life and describes losing the person he loved to cancer. The film opened Critics' Week at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and competed at the Annecy animation festival. It reached French cinemas on 1 July 2026, with a streaming release planned to follow. The animation was produced with open source software and the line is deliberately plain. The matter it treats is grief; the film does not detail the illness and looks at what comes after. The sections on the history of surfing are a separate layer and the palette changes there. The narrative keeps its emotional pressure low and leaves room for silence. Its limit is structure; the two lines do not always feed each other and the pace is slow. Who it is for: viewers who like animation for adults and narratives of grief. Who it is not for: it is slow, sad, and the ending bitter.