British Urban Film Festival 2026 – Interview With Director Fitch Jean (It Comes In Waves)

Fitch Jean wants you to reimagine how we see grief on the big screen.

“I wanted to show how, within this trauma, within those waves, there are moments, people and circumstances that are filled with love. It’s an introduction towards healing, because the waves are always going to be there. You just need to withstand them and learn how to swim,” he says. “That’s why ultimately I wanted to tell this story. I wanted you to learn to swim. That journey comes from love, community and seeing the big picture, and recognising that even within the destruction, there is beauty and connection, and that is much stronger than the pit or the trauma of grief.”

Mental health advocacy and Black representation are a passion for the Canadian-Haitian director, and it’s easy to see why. Not many films hit you emotionally as Jean’s film does. It Comes in Waves is a powerful and moving story about a family who flee from the horrors of the Rwandan genocide in the hope of a better life in Ottawa, Canada. Grief and trauma take centre stage and, like a wave, it’s a constant ebb and flow as we watch Akai (Star Trek: Discovery’s Adrian Walters) navigate the various challenges that refugee life presents: trying to excel as a track athlete, looking after his younger sister Zera (Nendia Lewars), and taking care of his struggling mother Sonia (Olunike Adeliyi). When tragedy strikes, it’s a visceral rawness colliding with an empathetic heart, reflecting the type of films Jean wants to put out into the world. “I truly believe that, as filmmakers, we don’t just have a mandate to entertain people. We also are there to educate and disrupt.”

Educate and disrupt are the operative words considering the moves the film has been making on the festival circuit. It has travelled the world: Canada, America and now the UK, where it received its European Premiere at this year’s British Urban Film Festival (BUFF). It walked away with the top prizes at the BUFF Awards, winning Best Feature and Best Actor in a Feature for Walters, who recently found continued success at the ACTRA Toronto Awards, an awards body voted by his Canadian peers. We joked that the success has “come in waves”, and while the accolades have been an important recognition, so has the film’s messaging on immigration, mental health and Black representation in cinema. He doesn’t want to become “another brick on the wall” when it comes to creating the same, stereotypical stories. He wants to set a new narrative.

Jean’s upcoming project is a WW1 short about the first and only segregated battalion in the Canadian Army, which is hoping to do the festival circuit later this year. He hopes to build a bigger conversation about forgotten Black stories. As an immigrant himself, his stories about underrepresented communities arrive amidst a resurgent wave of global anti-immigration rhetoric. While the landscape continues to shift drastically, so does Jean’s determination to keep going. 

“I ask myself, ‘Am I doing my part?’ Do I make a difference in the world when all these things are happening? I realised that I do, because my voice as a filmmaker is what I can use to challenge the status quo, to make those disruptions, to educate people on what trauma is. What does it mean to belong to a place? What does it mean when those voices are being buried? When you look back on history, storytelling has been one of the most powerful forces to influence and to inspire the masses, to the point that whenever a leader goes into power and dictates the narrative, that’s one of the first outlets they use to control people. So it shows you even more how important and powerful the stuff we do is.” 

That power has certainly resonated with its audiences. Jean shared a story at a recent Q&A screening in Los Angeles where Waves premiered. Unbeknownst to him, a Rwandan filmmaker was in the crowd. Emotionally taken aback, he went up to the director afterwards and showed his gratitude, vindication that Jean is heading in the right direction.

Such an experience is illustrative of Jean’s path, who fell in love with storytelling and worldbuilding from a young age. After emigrating to Canada, Disney’s The Lion King was his first film memory that provided him a “gateway to the movies”. At age 11, he was a keen writer with a “vast imagination”, immersing himself in sci-fi and fantasy stories (ones he hopes to revisit later in his career). Photography became a hobby during his time at Ottawa University, before making the transition into filmmaking. Barry Jenkins is a big inspiration for him as a director, with the Waves WhatsApp group chat named after Moonlight. He made four shorts before developing his feature – Forgive Me Father, Jayla, Plus que des Cheveux and As I Lay Still, all emotionally resonant and award-winning stories about the Black experience: love, family, friendships, hair and even the aftermath of war. The leap from shorts to features was challenging, highlighting the increased complexity of the filmmaking business. But it also taught him different things about the process and the encouragement he found once he saw light at the end of the tunnel. 

“Everything is exponentially more difficult, longer, and as much as you can do anything in a short, as much as you can prepare, nothing really prepares you for the feature. You just gotta go and do it. It’s extremely rewarding. Once you do it, you’re like, ‘wow’, and not just you, but other people see you differently.”

Yet tackling something as weighty as the Rwandan genocide for a feature-length film was not always an easy feat. Waves’ original inception came from an interest in trauma within Black communities. During its development, Jean’s father had passed away, and he had to work on himself to navigate his own relationship with grief. He also had to overcome the fear of telling a story that was not his and find ways to ensure its authenticity:

“The outward was reaching out to those communities and talking to people from Rwanda. Involving people from the community built this bridge and added those nuances that could have been missing from the project. We were doing it together where I felt I wasn’t appropriating, and it taught me a lot of things in the process.”

There’s often a larger conversation about how much trauma and pain we witness when it comes to the Black community. A danger of whether ‘affliction equals retraumatizing the audience’, an argument that circulated works like Gerald Bush and Christopher Renz’s 2020 film Antebellum or the first season of Amazon Prime’s Them. Jean and his frequent collaborator and writer Sammy Mohamed made a conscious effort to understand the psychology of how trauma works with Akai as its vessel. We witness his protectiveness throughout, shielding his sister from the things he witnessed growing up: the death of his best friend in Rwanda, the subsequent fallout and breakdown from his parents, the abuse he received from his father (and subsequent suicide) and watching his mother struggle to cope with these challenges. Waves presents these painful obstacles through snapshot memories, painting the larger picture of Akai’s life and the choices he makes throughout.

“It’s a balance, you know,” Jean explains. “I didn’t want to create something gratuitous, like trauma porn, because I don’t think that’s helpful and it wasn’t necessary. Trauma lives in the things we don’t want to see or remember. It’s like a memory, and you’re piecing things together – a traumatic event that keeps replaying. I felt like we just needed enough to get yourself into that world and that pain without having to live in it. The film is not just about the Rwandan Genocide, but rather the ripples of something as traumatic as that, the kind that, if not handled with care, they turn into a tsunami of pain.”

That application finds compassion in characters such as Sonia, whose own tragic journey is a key cornerstone in Waves. While other films may be quick to demonise, Jean’s film shows understanding when wrestling with sad, harsh truths. Not only is it an incredible performance by Adeliyi for finding those complex layers, Jean also credits the work of Somali-Canadian Mohamed for helping him shape that lens. 

Yet the film’s biggest strength lies with Akai and Zera. Whilst the film could have charted in various directions with its choices and consequences, Walters and Lewars’ performances are its heart and soul, displaying the kind of warmth and love that makes the discussion about mental health open, accessible and emotionally vulnerable. It’s impressive to hear how the pair were cast: Walters was given the green light after Jean had watched him in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Porter. Meanwhile, Lewars was part of an extensive casting search where over two hundred girls auditioned. The pair didn’t have a lot of time to build that brother-sister chemistry, but it was a “match made in heaven” for Jean as he watched the actors shine on camera. So how did he get the best out of the duo knowing they were wading through a challenging subject matter? 

With Walters, his previous work on television allowed him the tools to create separation from the character when needed. Whilst no stranger to working with younger actors, for Lewars, Jean’s process was different: “She was very young, so there’s a lot of things that she didn’t even understand, so it was really about giving her just enough so she can be the character. It was about changing my language and how I approach directions, and that allowed me to really have that connection with Nendia. Also having her parents on set with us throughout, and just being there, also helped as well.”

And as for what he hopes audiences take away from Waves, Jean’s response is one of resilience: “I hope that the people who are dealing with trauma see a way through. I hope that it creates awareness. I hope it sparks a dialogue that people start to talk about it more openly, especially people from marginalised communities. I hope that people that are not from those communities start to develop allyship and help create outlets for better communication that leads towards awareness and healing.”