IN WAVES
Director: Phuong Mai Nguyen
Screenwriters: Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux
Logline: Grief comes in waves, a universal truth that is especially true here. For her debut feature, director Phuong Mai Nguyen adapts AJ Dungo’s graphic novel to tell a personal tale of friendship, love, and loss. AJ (Will Sharpe), a young skater, meets Kristen (Stephanie Hsu), a young surfer living with cancer, and the two bond over a passion for the ocean during their brief time together. Tracing the Hawaiian origins of surfing, the film renders water as a sacred element with spiritual depth, offering a joy and strength that the two find solace in as they confront her illness.
Distributor: Netflix
Panelists: Phuong Mai Nguyen, Director, Will Sharpe, Actor, Stephanie Hsu, Actor
First screening: Monday, September 14, TIFF Lightbox
Key quote: “I think it’s big. I felt that way before I met AJ, but then the day that I met him I was so relieved because, in a way, I felt like he had trust in me, like he just gave me the baby. It’s like his own story, and also it was his true story, and it’s kind of intimate. I felt like I entered a private place that I shouldn’t be. At first, I was kind of nervous about that, but then AJ just made it very, very simple for me to get his story and he also gave me like the freedom to adapt it as I would like it to be.” – Phuong Mai Nguyen
“I hadn’t read the graphic novel, and so I was sent the pretty much completely animated version of the movie with the [original] French [actors’] voices, and I just thought it was so beautiful. I particularly loved the impressionistic segues and how the illustrative medium pulls you into their inner world and you get a sense of their psychology. I thought that was really poetic, and the whole thing was very light-handedly, delicately handled.” – Will Sharpe
“I feel like I keep talking about witchcraft today, but there is something about seeing the bodies and souls of these characters and these people already in front of you, and then having to fill what they’re already feeling, that, I don’t know, it’s like summoning and and entering something that already exists, as opposed to when you’re usually animating, you just start from the voice, or you don’t see the the animation yet… I felt like in the end, you just have to inhabit it the same as a live action film.” – Stephanie Hsu
Watch the video above.
The Deadline Studio at TIFF is hosted at Bisha Hotel and presented by Volvo, Columbia, Patrón and Schwarzkopf.
