In Waves brings surfing love story from Cannes to Toronto
Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu lead the voice cast of In Waves, an animated love story set in the California surfing world.
The film opened the 65th Cannes Critics' Week in May before moving to the Discovery programme at the Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix is the distributor, according to Deadline.
Sharpe voices AJ, a young skater. Hsu voices Kristen, a young surfer living with cancer. The pair bond over a shared passion for the ocean in what festival notes describe as a personal tale of friendship, love and loss.
The ocean does the rest. Toronto listings bill it as a star-crossed romance, built around surfing, skating and the pull of the Pacific coast.
The film adapts AJ Dungo's graphic novel In Waves, published in 2019. Dungo, a Los Angeles illustrator, built the book as a graphic memoir drawn from his own life, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The screen version keeps AJ as its central character.
It is the debut feature from Vietnamese-French film-maker Phuong Mai Nguyen. The script is by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux, Deadline reported. Critics' Week, the Cannes sidebar devoted to first and second films, chose it as its opening title.
A first clip pairing Hsu and Sharpe was released around the Cannes premiere, Deadline reported. In Toronto, the France-Belgium production was programmed in Discovery, the section for emerging directors to watch, according to TIFF.
TIFF 2026 runs 10-20 September. Listings placed In Waves across four screenings in the festival's Lightbox cinemas. The colour palette stays close to the sea, with animation carrying shifts in time and memory.
Nguyen joined Sharpe and Hsu to discuss the film for Deadline's festival studio at Toronto's Bisha Hotel on 14 September. The session brought director and voice cast together after the Cannes launch. Semaine de la Critique, the organisation behind Critics' Week, also published an interview with Nguyen about the adaptation.
What makes this stand out is the chain. A personal comic becomes a two-country co-production, then a Cannes opener, then a Toronto Discovery title, then a Netflix release. For fans following festival titles, this is the familiar route from sidebar premiere to wider streaming audience.
