Malaysian director’s film gets home release date

A Malaysian director who spent years making films abroad is finally bringing one of his features home. Kek-Huat Lau’s drama *The Waves Will Carry Us* opens nationwide in Malaysia on April 16, 2026, after earlier festival runs in Taiwan, Japan, Hawaii, Poland, and the United States. (tgv.com.my, imdb.com) The film starts with a funeral and then turns into a fight over a body. Cinema listings in Malaysia say Ah Yao returns after his father dies, only for a religious authority to intervene and try to take the corpse, pushing three siblings into a family crisis. (tgv.com.my, cinema.com.my) That plot is not just invented melodrama. Malaysian coverage says the story draws from a real “body-snatching” case, which helps explain why the movie keeps circling family ritual, religion, and who gets to decide a person’s identity after death. (tgv.com.my, icon.my) Lau is a Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker, and that split life sits inside the movie. Festival notes describe the film as a story about migration and identity beyond borders, while the lead character is also someone returning from years away to face a family history that never stayed buried. (hiff.org, taiwanfilmfestival.org.au, imdb.com) The cast reflects that cross-border setup too. Vera Chen, Wei Chun-chan, and Fabian Loo lead a film shot in both Malaysia and Taiwan and performed across Mandarin, Malay, and Cantonese, which gives the family argument the sound of a region rather than a single city. (taicca.tw, cinema.com.my, sdaff.org) Before this Malaysia release, the movie had already built a festival résumé. It premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival, screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival and the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and picked up five Golden Horse Award nominations. (hiff.org, taicca.tw, sdaff.org) One of those nominations turned into a win. Vera Chen took the Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the trailer and festival materials have leaned on that prize as the film moves into commercial release. (youtube.com, taicca.tw) The homecoming angle is bigger than one release date. A December 2025 report in Malaysia said *The Waves Will Carry Us* had passed the country’s film censorship board after Lau’s earlier fiction and documentary work had been banned locally over material tied to Malayan Communist history, making this his first formal Malaysian theatrical release in years. (bigcowfm.com) That history changes the feel of this opening weekend. What looks like a darkly funny film about siblings, funerals, and bureaucratic absurdity is also a return by a filmmaker whose work on memory, migration, and belonging has often sat uncomfortably close to national fault lines. (hiff.org, bigcowfm.com, icon.my)