The American French Film Festival will begin its 30th-anniversary edition with In Waves, an animated feature directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen. The film is scheduled to open the festival on Nov. 3 at the DGA complex in West Hollywood, with the event running through Nov. 8.
That makes animation the opening-night headliner for the first time in the festival’s history—a fittingly splashy move for a film rooted in surfing, young love and grief. The screening is being presented in association with Netflix, which is handling U.S. distribution for the finished feature.
In Waves adapts the graphic novel by AJ Dungo, a Californian surfer and self-taught artist. Its central relationship follows a shy teenage boy and the girl who teaches him both how to surf and how to approach life with greater openness. The romance is shadowed by her eventual death from cancer, placing loss at the center of a story that begins in the kinetic, sunlit world of the ocean.
Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu are part of the English-language voice cast. The film previously debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, where it became the first animated feature selected to open Critics’ Week.
From personal graphic novel to French animated feature
The route taken by In Waves is especially notable because its subject and origins cross several creative borders. Dungo made the graphic novel over a period of years as a way to process the death of his girlfriend. Nguyen, a French-Vietnamese filmmaker, and Silex Films later secured the adaptation rights, developed the project as a French production and brought Dungo’s drawings into animated form.
That is more than a change of medium. A graphic novel’s linework, pacing and use of stillness are part of how readers receive its emotion. Animation can preserve the visual identity of a book, but it must also decide how those lines move, how long a moment lasts, and how sound and voice alter the viewer’s connection to its characters. For a story involving bereavement, those choices are likely to carry unusual weight: the adaptation is not simply recounting events, but translating an autobiographical act of remembrance from page to screen.
The film’s journey also neatly reflects the festival’s Franco-American focus. Its source material grew from a Californian artist and surfer’s experience; its feature adaptation was assembled through French filmmaking; and it is now returning to a U.S. audience with Netflix as distributor. The opening slot gives that transatlantic production history a particularly visible stage.
Why the graphic-novel connection matters
Graphic-novel adaptations are often discussed in terms of plot fidelity, but the more revealing question can be whether the film carries over the original work’s point of view. In this case, the book’s basis in Dungo’s lived experience gives the project an intimate starting point. Nguyen’s task is therefore not just to make an animated romance or a surfing story, but to find a cinematic language for a deeply personal account of love and mourning.
Animation is sometimes wrongly treated as a genre rather than a filmmaking form. It can support comedy, fantasy and family entertainment, but it can also offer a carefully stylized way to tell adult, painful or autobiographical stories. By choosing In Waves for opening night, the festival is putting that range front and center rather than treating animation as a sidebar to live-action cinema.
The film already had a direct connection to the festival before earning its opening-night berth. In 2024, Dungo and In Waves producer Priscilla Bertin participated in a workshop, “Bringing Graphic Worlds to Life,” presented by the festival and the Writers Guild of America West. Their discussion concerned the path from the page to the screen, making this year’s screening feel like the next public chapter in a process audiences had previously been invited to examine.
Netflix’s involvement also arrives as the company continues to build out its animation activity, including its kids slate. Readers looking for another recent Netflix animation update can find details on the planned KPop Demon Hunters: Ready, Set Shine release. The two projects are very different propositions, but together they underline how broad animation’s present-day audience and subject matter can be.
A festival anniversary with television in the frame too
The full festival lineup is due to be announced on Oct. 6. However, organizers have already named 12 television series that will compete for both the festival’s Audience Award and Jury Award. Their selection spans biography, youth drama, crime, comedy, romance, documentary and historical drama, suggesting that the anniversary edition intends to give television a substantial role alongside film.
Among the factual and historical projects is Alice: Pioneer of Cinema, directed by Virginie Verrier and Guillaume Lonergan. Written by Tim Loane, Claire LeMaréchal and André Gulluni, it stars Bérénice Bejo as artist and entrepreneur Alice Guy.
Rebounds: A History of Electro Dance, written and directed by Loïc Phil and Marianne Getti, takes a documentary approach. It follows dancer and choreographer Brandon Masele, known as Miel, as he explores electro dance’s international development and the Tecktonik phenomenon.
Several of the contenders put institutions under pressure. All Shapes of Us, created by Fanny Riedberger and directed by Jean-Baptiste Pouilloux and Elsa Bennett, follows six teenagers at the Hive, a school specializing in eating disorders. Catherine Frot, Claudia Tagbo, Ornella Fleury, Gérémy Crédeville and Marc Riso star.
In Laura’s Treatment, created and written by Marie Kremer and Frédéric Krivine and directed by Alim Iske, Valérie Bonneton plays Laura, a pharmacist and mother who leads a support group for abuse victims. After the authorities and justice system fail the women and one member is killed, Laura takes action herself.
Minimum Security, created by John Wax and Gauthier Plancquaert, approaches incarceration from a comic angle. Audrey Lamy plays the director of a French prison, overseeing an error-prone collection of guards and inmates with a maternal instinct that appears to be doing plenty of overtime.
Crime, mystery and obsession feature prominently elsewhere in the competition:
- Paolo, created by Sébastien Marnier, stars Jérôme Niel as a man whose reunion with a former schoolmate, now a mayoral candidate played by Yoann Gasiorowski, shifts from admiration into obsession.
- Prophet (A), created by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, is based on Jacques Audiard’s feature A Prophet. Mamadou Sidibé plays Malik, a young African immigrant imprisoned after drug smuggling who must try to survive inside.
- R 91, created by Henri Debeurme and Mathilde Arnaud and directed by Julien Despaux, places an investigation aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Following the death of one crew member and the disappearance of another, an investigator is sent to the vessel during a strategically tense eastern Mediterranean mission.
- Singapura, created and written by Elsa Marpeau and directed by Danielle Arbid, follows Justine, played by Nailia Harzoune, after she arrives in Singapore seeking a new start. Her connection with Élisa, played by India Hair, is complicated when murder exposes concealed lies and betrayals in a French expatriate community.
Romance, ambition and dangerous new worlds
Not every series in the field is built around a criminal investigation or institutional peril. One Day We Will Make Love, written and directed by Jérôme Bonnell, stars Natacha Krief and Édouard Sulpice as strangers with very little in common beyond difficult days and an unexpectedly joyful, alcohol-fueled night. The story considers whether a weekend can become the beginning of love.
Someone Should Ban Sunday Afternoons, created by Isabel Coixet, follows Louise, an aspiring filmmaker who relocates to Paris to work under a famed American writer-director. Liv Henneguier, Clara Bretheau, Théo Christine, Balibar and Tim Robbins star in a drama where the imagined romance of artistic life confronts a more difficult Parisian reality.
Finally, Swapped heads to 19th-century Paris. Written and created by Alexandra Echkenazi and Vincent Robert, and directed by Vania Leturcq and Savina Dellicour, the drama stars Lula Cotton-Frapier as Rose. Leaving her rural home to become a wet nurse for a wealthy bourgeois household, Rose finds herself entering a threatening and dark environment.
The television competition is presented in association with Wild Bunch, Federation Studios, France TV Distribution, Disney+, Film & Picture, HBO Max, StudioCanal, SND Group M6 and Zorba Prods.
What audiences can take from the opening choice
The confirmed programming does not reveal the entire festival slate yet, but In Waves establishes a clear opening statement. It is an English-language animated adaptation of a deeply personal American graphic novel, realized through French production and craft, with a story whose emotional stakes are far from lightweight. Surfing may bring motion and visual energy; the subject of grief ensures the film is not simply coasting on good vibes and good weather.
For audiences attending Nov. 3, the practical headline is straightforward: the festival begins with animation, not as novelty programming but as the principal event. The subsequent television competition adds a dozen different entry points into contemporary French-language storytelling, from electro dance history to romance, prison comedy, political obsession and a mystery at sea.
That makes the 30th edition’s first confirmed details feel less like a nostalgia lap and more like a broad statement of format and subject. The festival’s opening film looks backward through memory and loss, but its place on the schedule points toward animation’s continuing ability to hold complicated, personal stories.
