In Waves Leads American French Film Festival’s 3,000-Student L.A. Screenings
- The Scoop: Phuong Mai Nguyen’s animated feature In Waves opens the 30th American French Film Festival and anchors free screenings for roughly 3,000 Southern California high school students.
- Venue & Scale: The student program runs five days of in-person screenings and Q&As at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, drawing students from 60 schools.
- Festival Footprint: The 2026 edition runs November 3, 8, placing the film’s educational rollout squarely inside the early-November awards-season corridor.
- Talent Package: Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu lead the voice cast of the AJ Dungo graphic-memoir adaptation, scripted by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux.
The American French Film Festival is busing roughly 3,000 high school students from 60 Southern California schools into five days of free In Waves screenings at the Directors Guild of America.
The 30th edition, running November 3, 8, 2026, hands Phuong Mai Nguyen’s feature debut the opening slot and the festival’s largest youth-audience push to date.
Directors Guild Screening Room Becomes a Classroom for First-Run Animation
The festival has built its student program over years, with more than 150 Southern California high schools attending since its inception. This year’s edition concentrates that pipeline on a single title, turning the DGA into a working classroom for animated storytelling.
Nguyen directs from a screenplay by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux, adapting AJ Dungo’s graphic memoir about love, loss and surfing. The California coastline setting gives the student audience an immediate geographic handhold on material that travels from a high school dance to grief and artistic preservation.
Will Sharpe voices AJ, the reserved Los Angeles student who draws and skateboards, opposite Stephanie Hsu as Kristen, the surfer who upends his world. Johnny Young, Alejandro Antonio Ruiz, Griffin Puatu, Taiana Tully and Jacki Jing round out the supporting voice roster.
Sharpe’s profile surged through The White Lotus, while Hsu’s breakout came via Everything Everywhere All at Once, a pairing that gives the film marquee recognition with exactly the young demographic the festival is courting.
Netflix Backing and a Cannes Critics’ Week Launch Give the Outreach Real Weight
The film opened the 2026 Cannes Critics’ Week, a prestige berth that typically signals a distributor’s awards-season intentions. Netflix’s official materials confirm the premise, director and principal cast, positioning the title for a global platform rollout.
That festival pedigree is what makes the free student screenings more than a civic gesture. A platform release needs cultural oxygen before it hits living rooms, and 3,000 teenagers in a DGA theater generate the kind of word-of-mouth no paid campaign can manufacture.
The early-November window sits in the thick of awards chatter and fall festival traffic, a corridor where specialty titles fight for attention. Anchoring the educational program to a Cannes-launched title lets the festival borrow that momentum for its own institutional profile.
For Netflix, the math is straightforward: theatrical-adjacent visibility at zero ticket cost functions as a subscriber-acquisition funnel aimed at families and schools, not just opening-weekend receipts. The festival, in turn, converts a French-cinema mandate into a measurable audience pipeline.
Track the full fall festival and release calendar across our trade entertainment wire desk as the November corridor takes shape.
Ankit Jaiswal is the Chief Author, covering Indian cinema and OTT releases with honest, no-filler criticism. An SEO strategist by background, he brings a research-driven approach to film writing, cutting through hype to tell you exactly what's worth your time.
Related Movies & Releases
