It Comes in Waves (2025) by Fitch Jean

Akai escaped Rwanda with his family but not without witnessing violence that left him mentally scarred. In Ottawa, he works at a variety store, runs track, and holds the family together while their mother’s health silently deteriorates. When she dies, Akai — 17, with no plan and a limited support system — becomes solely responsible for his younger sister Zera. The trauma of Rwanda doesn’t stay in Rwanda. It comes in waves. Written by Somali-Canadian Sammy Mohamed from a story by Haitian-Canadian director Fitch Jean. Shot entirely on location in Ottawa, Perth, and Toronto over two weeks, with members of Ottawa’s Rwandan community in the cast and Kinyarwanda dialogue performed by native speakers. World premiere American Black Film Festival, Miami, June 2025. Canadian distribution: Mongrel Media.

It Comes in Waves won 7 awards across three festivals: five at Toronto Reelworld Film Festival 2025 — Outstanding Feature Film, Outstanding Actor (Walters), Outstanding Cinematographer (Jelan Maxwell), Outstanding Writer (Mohamed), Outstanding Producer (Zargara) — plus Audience Choice at the Sidewalk Film Festival and Audience Favorite at the Ottawa Canadian Film Festival. CBC Arts ran a profile on Jean after the Reelworld sweep. SHIFTER reviewed the film as a step forward for Canadian BIPOC filmmaking and placed it in the context of the Canadian Screen Awards season. Austin Film Festival called it one of the most memorable films at the festival. The casting process spanned a year; Kinyarwanda scenes used non-actor native speakers from Ottawa’s Rwandan community; two Rwandan community consultants — Marshall Ubaruta and Patrick Rubayiza — advised on the genocide history.

• The Kinyarwanda dialogue and non-actor Rwandan community casting give the film an authenticity that no conventional production design could replicate — the community’s own voice performs its own story.

• Jean’s personal formation — moving from Haiti to Canada at five, growing up feeling “in-between, trying to fit into a place that doesn’t always see you” — became the emotional DNA of Akai’s silence and internalized pain.

• The two-week production schedule demanded a filmmaking discipline that concentrates every resource on performance and emotional truth rather than production value.

• The mother’s death as narrative turning point — Akai and the audience grieving simultaneously — is the film’s most emotionally precise structural choice, cited by multiple reviewers as the moment the film becomes unavoidable.

• The five Reelworld awards generated CBC Arts coverage, SHIFTER coverage, and Caribbean Camera coverage simultaneously — giving the film a media footprint that micro-budget debut features rarely access.

• Jean and the film are positioned within a growing Black Canadian filmmaker movement — alongside Ottawa names reclaiming cinematic representation of Canada’s capital — giving the film a cultural argument beyond its individual story.

• The Kitchen Conversation — comparable to Moonlight, Aftersun, The Worst Person in the World; Walters gives one of the best lead performances of the year; Jean’s direction strikingly empathetic.

• Austin Film Festival — masterful exploration of loss, love and family; bold authentic characters that linger; start of a filmmaker with a strong voice; not a dry eye left.

• SHIFTER (Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic) — award-worthy performances, Walters makes his debut as leading man with capability confirmed; Lewars sets herself apart as Canadian talent to watch.

• At the Movies Online — beautiful painting in the form of a film; memory, grief, identity, spiritual transcendence. Letterboxd — amazingly tender and patient meditation on grief; Walters gives one of the year’s best lead performances; Lewars showstopping. IMDb 8.6 from 43 viewers.

• Toronto Reelworld Film Festival 2025: Outstanding Feature Film, Outstanding Actor (Walters), Outstanding Cinematographer (Maxwell), Outstanding Writer (Mohamed), Outstanding Producer (Zargara) — 5 wins.

• Sidewalk Film Festival 2025: Audience Choice Award Best Narrative Feature.

• Ottawa Canadian Film Festival 2025: Audience Favorite Best Film.

• World premiere ABFF Miami, June 14, 2025. Also screened: Cinefest Sudbury, Austin Film Festival, Urbanworld Film Festival New York, Windsor International Film Festival.

• Fitch Jean — Haitian-Canadian, moved to Canada at five — heard a Rwandan family’s genocide story at dinner as a young man, and spent years building the research, community relationships, and screenplay that became this film. Also edits his own work.

• Adrian Walters (Akai) — Handmaid’s Tale, Star Trek: Discovery, Dora Mavor Moore Award nominee for theatre — makes his leading man debut with a performance every reviewer cited as the film’s most exceptional element. Researched Rwanda genocide survivor testimony, sounds, and hymns to build the character from the inside.

• Nendia Lewars (Zera) — chosen from over 100 auditions for the role, encapsulating both joy and emotional depth — cited by Letterboxd critics and user reviews as a showstopping performance from a very young actor.

• Olunike Adeliyi (Sonia) — established Canadian actor — provides the adult community support structure that gives Akai’s world its fragile social network.

• Jelan Maxwell — cinematographer and colour grader — delivers work cited by Reelworld as award-worthy, giving a two-week Ottawa production a visual palette that reviewers compare to prestige drama.

The seven awards, the CBC Arts profile, and the Moonlight comparisons confirm that It Comes in Waves has earned critical standing that its production circumstances had no right to produce. Walters is the film’s most irreplaceable asset. Jean is the filmmaker whose next project will be closely watched.

It Comes in Waves belongs to the tradition of intimate immigrant coming-of-age drama that uses a young protagonist’s navigation of a new country as the lens for examining generational trauma — Moonlight, Minari, Aftersun-adjacent — but its specific contribution is the Rwandan genocide diaspora in Ottawa, a community and a geography that Canadian cinema has never previously centred. Jean’s Haitian-Canadian perspective — his own in-between formation — gives the film an immigrant’s empathy for another immigrant community’s specific trauma rather than an outsider’s ethnographic gaze.

• The film’s use of Kinyarwanda dialogue with non-actor native speakers and two Rwandan community consultants gives it documentary-level cultural authority within a fiction framework.

• Jean’s thematic focus — Black men taught to suppress trauma through prayer and stoicism, the silence that shapes men who are never given permission to grieve — positions the film within a specific and underrepresented discourse about Black male mental health.

• The Ottawa setting — not Toronto, not the conventional Canadian cinema geography — is the film’s most specific cultural statement, and SHIFTER explicitly frames it as a love letter to Ottawa from filmmakers who grew up there.

• The mother’s decline and death as the structural turning point reframes the film from immigrant drama into a coming-of-age story about a teenager who has to become an adult before he has finished grieving being a child.

The film’s double specificity — Rwandan diaspora in Ottawa, Black male grief — occupies a space that Canadian cinema has left entirely empty. That specificity is both its most commercially niche quality and its most culturally necessary one.

• The growing Black Canadian filmmaker movement — SHIFTER placed Jean alongside RT Thorne, Ron Dias, Karen Chapman, and Reza Dahya — gives It Comes in Waves institutional context within a specific and accelerating cultural moment.

• Mongrel Media’s Canadian distribution gives the film the domestic infrastructure that micro-budget BIPOC debut features struggle to access.

• The ABFF world premiere positioning connects the film to the international Black film festival circuit rather than the conventional Canadian arthouse circuit — a strategic distribution choice that reached its most immediately receptive audience first.

• The Rwandan genocide — 1994, one million dead in one hundred days — remains one of the most underrepresented events in global cinema relative to its historical scale and ongoing generational impact.

• The intergenerational trauma drama has built a consistent and emotionally engaged international audience through Moonlight, Minari, and comparable films that use intimate family stories to address collective historical wounds.

• The Canadian Screen Awards context — SHIFTER’s review explicitly framed the film within that season — gives it institutional domestic validation pathways that the festival circuit alone cannot provide.

• The ABFF premiere followed by Sidewalk, Reelworld, Austin, and Urbanworld gives the film a systematic festival circuit that builds audience across Black film, Canadian film, and independent drama communities simultaneously.

• Kinyarwanda dialogue and Rwandan community casting give the film discovery access within the Rwandan diaspora community in Canada and internationally — an audience for whom accurate representation is itself an act of cultural recognition.

• Walters’s profile — Handmaid’s Tale, Star Trek: Discovery — gives the film discovery access to Canadian television drama audiences who have followed his career and will seek out his leading man debut.

The core audience is 20–55 — Black Canadian cinema audiences who follow the BIPOC filmmaker movement, diaspora trauma drama viewers who responded to Moonlight and Minari, the Rwandan community in Canada and internationally, and Walters’s established Canadian television following. The Moonlight comparisons position the film precisely within the arthouse emotional drama demographic. The seven awards give it critical credibility that precedes viewing for the audience that uses awards as discovery signals.

It Comes in Waves found exactly the audiences it needed through a systematic festival strategy that prioritised community before arthouse. The Reelworld sweep gave it national Canadian cultural visibility. Walters’s performance is the film’s most reliable word-of-mouth driver.

Jean delivers a debut of extraordinary emotional precision — the two-week production is invisible in the final cut, the Kinyarwanda authenticity gives the film its moral authority, and Walters’s Akai is the kind of performance that makes a debut feel like a career confirmation. The Moonlight comparisons are justified in the sense that both films refuse to explain their characters and trust the audience to carry the weight of what they observe. The mother’s death is the film’s most structurally precise choice. Lewars’s Zera is its most surprising performance revelation.

Works best for viewers who respond to intimate immigrant family drama that refuses to sentimentalise its subject and trusts the audience to grieve alongside its characters. The Rwandan genocide specificity gives it immediate cultural resonance for the diaspora community; the universal intergenerational trauma argument gives it cross-demographic reach.

Jean’s directorial statement is the film’s most precise thematic summary — the immigrant instinct to survive by keeping things in, the generational silence that shapes Black men who are taught never to express pain. Akai internalises everything. The film shows what that looks like beneath the surface. The title is both plot mechanics and the film’s complete argument.

The Kinyarwanda dialogue, the non-actor community casting, the two Rwandan consultants — It Comes in Waves is the first film to give the Ottawa Rwandan diaspora community accurate and sustained cinematic representation. For that community, the film carries a weight that arthouse validation cannot measure.

Jean’s explicit framing — growing up in a Haitian household where mental health wasn’t discussed, only prayer and stoicism; seeing how that silence shapes men — gives the film a specific social argument about Black male grief that connects the Rwandan genocide story to a universal pattern. Akai is 17 and carrying everything. The film shows what that costs.

Walters’s year of research — survivor testimony, genocide photographs, Rwandan hymns and battle cries — gives Akai’s silence a specific gravity that pure craft cannot manufacture. Every reviewer who saw the film cited his performance as the year’s best or among the year’s best in Canadian cinema. Lewars, chosen from over 100 auditions, is the film’s most surprising discovery — the Letterboxd consensus called her “absolutely unbelievable, showstopping.”

It Comes in Waves will be remembered as the film that introduced Fitch Jean and Adrian Walters to Canadian cinema with complete authority — one making his directorial debut, the other his leading man debut, both delivering at the highest available level within their respective roles. The Moonlight comparisons are the film’s most consequential critical legacy. Jean’s next film will be one of Canadian cinema’s most anticipated directorial second features.

• 7 wins: Reelworld (5), Sidewalk Audience Choice, Ottawa Canadian Film Festival Audience Favorite.

• World premiere ABFF Miami, June 14, 2025. Mongrel Media Canadian distribution. IMDb 8.6 from 43 viewers.

Seven awards from three audience and jury bodies confirm the film connects across every demographic it reaches. The Mongrel Media distribution gives it the Canadian infrastructure the debut deserves.

It Comes in Waves proves that the most powerful films about trauma are the ones that trust the audience to carry what the characters cannot say — and that Fitch Jean already knows this at his debut.

The trauma comes in waves. The film stays.

• Movie themes: Intergenerational trauma and its specific transmission through Black male silence, the immigrant experience’s double burden of building a new life while carrying an old horror, Rwandan genocide diaspora in Canada, the teenager who becomes a parent before he finishes being a child, and the universal argument that grief unacknowledged doesn’t disappear — it returns.

• Movie director: Fitch Jean — Haitian-Canadian, moved to Canada at five — makes a debut of genuine formal maturity: two weeks of production, Kinyarwanda authenticity, community consultation, and an emotionally precise screenplay that trusts silence over explanation.

• Top casting: Walters builds Akai from a year of genocide survivor research into one of Canadian cinema’s best lead performances of 2025. Lewars is the film’s most surprising revelation — chosen from over 100 auditions, showstopping at a very young age. Adeliyi anchors the adult support network.

• Awards and recognition: 7 wins — Reelworld Film Festival (5), Sidewalk Audience Choice, Ottawa Canadian Film Festival Audience Favorite. World premiere ABFF Miami, June 14, 2025. Canadian distribution: Mongrel Media.

• Why to watch: The film that gives the Ottawa Rwandan diaspora its first cinematic representation — built on Kinyarwanda authenticity, community consultation, and a lead performance that every reviewer compared to the year’s best — directed by a Haitian-Canadian filmmaker whose empathy for another immigrant community’s specific trauma produces the debut film’s most essential moral authority.

• Key success factors: Walters’s career-confirming lead performance plus Lewars’s showstopping debut plus Jean’s two-weeks-of-production formal discipline plus Kinyarwanda community authenticity plus the seven-festival sweep plus Mongrel Media’s Canadian distribution — a combination that gives a micro-budget debut drama the cultural standing and distribution infrastructure it deserves.

• Where to watch: Canadian distribution via Mongrel Media. International rights available. Festival circuit ongoing.