This archive report was first published on 27 November 2019.
Published on November 27, 2019, the film 'Waves' has been hailed as a knockout by the New York Times and an intimate epic by The Hollywood Reporter.
Directed by Trey Edward Shults, the movie is a coming-of-age teen drama that portrays a black middle-class family in Miami which implodes following a tragedy.
Shults modelled the film's strict patriarch on his own stepfather, whose overzealous coaching results in a hideous high-school wrestling injury, a trauma which is dramatized in the movie and leads to devastating consequences.
"It is a cautionary tale of the traditional idea of masculinity," Shults, 31, told AFP. "We don't have to build these tough exteriors -- we can be vulnerable, we can communicate."
The film shows how the expectation that teenage boys be strong, silent and stoic endures in American culture.
Shults said he forged the central character after swapping stories with star Kelvin Harrison, whose musician father tried and failed to push him to follow in his footsteps.
"We would do these sort of intense therapy sessions... him talking about his father's state of mind, his father's father, where that stuff came from," Shults said.
The consequences of that pressure led, midway through the film, to what Shults calls "the ultimate tragedy."
Later, another character's reluctant visit to reconcile with his dying biological father in hospital is ripped directly from the director's own life.
"It's like an all-consuming dread that hits you at, like, the pit of your stomach, reliving the most traumatic thing... It was cathartic. But it was hard," Shults said.
