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| Sia Alipour in A Good Day Will Come |
Each year, the short films which pass through the festival voting system to become Oscar-qualifying bring important issues to the fore, but few feel as urgent as Amir Zargara’s take on the difficulties of life in Iran. A Good Day Will Come draws on the story of Navid Afkari, a popular wrestler who was put to death on 12 September 2020, at the age of just 27. It tells the story of a fictional wrestler, Arash, who feels pressure to use his fame to speak up about public concerns, though doing so puts him in a vulnerable position. Amir himself is in a safer position because he lives in Canada, so he was able to connect with me to discuss the film.
“The lead character is inspired by Navid,” he says. “The film is fiction. It was going to be a docudrama originally, and then that script evolved into this fictionalised version that's inspired by Navid and his journey. He was a wrestler. He was executed by the Iranian regime four years ago. So he had various charges, one of them being an act against God. It's this law they have, which essentially says he has acted against the power of God. And then they also pinned a murder case on him and his brothers.
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| A Good Day Will Come |
“There's this CCTV footage that's just like, there's no faces, and they're saying that's him. And there's all the audio stuff as well that they wouldn't even play in court. So it was like a sham trial. They wouldn't even play CCTV footage in court as evidence. They were essentially going based on his confession, which was coerced – that's also in my version – by threatening his family members. That's why he ended up confessing, because he didn't want any harm to come to them.”
Wrestling is a niche interest in the UK but a big deal in Iran.
“Wrestling is our national sport,” says Amir. “I grew up wrestling myself. One of my earliest memories is wrestling with my dad in front of the TV every night before bed. I wouldn't go to bed until my shirt was all sweaty. Wrestlers are just the people that we look up to as people. People such as Gholamreza Takhti, who everyone looks up to in Iran just because he's a symbol of honour, and because of everything that he did off the mat as well, of course. I mean, to the detriment to his own health, essentially. The burden of the people on his shoulder was so heavy that he ended up committing suicide.
“Also mystically, we have wrestlers in our poetry. In this great poetry book called Shahnameh. It could be compared to our Shakespeare or our Dante’s Inferno, let's say – it's of that magnitude. One of the characters in that, Rostam, is a renowned wrestler as well. A man of honour and courage and a warrior who also wrestles. It's very infused within the culture.”
We hear a little bit about Arash's father over the course of the film, and there's an implication that he also was somebody wrestled and felt he had to stand up and speak. In his absence, Arash seems to be looking to his coach as a father figure. He's a very young man himself and he doesn't necessarily know the best way to use the power that fame has given him.
“Yeah, it's a multifaceted thing. There's the dad, there's the coach, and then there's Arash. And that's essentially what I really wanted to show. These wrestlers are super young. They're in their early 20s, and there's just so much weight on them. To wrestle at the highest level, which is the international tournaments and Olympics, the government, the regime in power has to pick you. It's not just about qualifying – after that, there's also a selection process.
“It just happened with the FIFA World Cup as well. Some of the best players weren't on the team because they had spoken against the regime on social media, and that's the line that gets muddied. Anything you mix with politics, it just ends up becoming grey. So all these things have been passed on from his father and, as you said, there are a few hints here and there that allude to his background and what happened to him. He was a friend with the coach and the coach has has become this other person now who's like ‘Just keep your head down, mind your business, just wrestle.’ And these takes are all valid. No one's wrong in this. Again, it's a short film, so it's tough, but I really try to build empathy for all sides, and I hope to explore even more in the feature film format.”
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| A Good Day Will Come |
There are, I observe, even military characters who seem sympathetic to protesters.
“Yeah,” he says. “It's like everywhere else, right? A lot of people in most countries work for the government or work for organisations associated with the government. They might have ideas that are different or be against certain actions that the government takes, but then they have jobs and they have families that they have to provide for. And in countries like mine, those actions have consequences, you know? So that scene that you mention, the commander in charge there, he's in between a rock and a hard place as he's looking back at the other figures and then he's looking forward.
“People would say he made the right choice or he made the moral choice or whatever, but the right choice for who? He made the right choice for the people in front of him, but then what about his little kid now? His father might not have a job, or even charges might come. Perhaps his father is going to be taken away, or those soldiers will have to deal with the repercussions of that commander's decision making. You know, again, it's just all grey. No one's wrong. No one's right. And that's what I really wanted to show.
“I wanted people who watch it to really feel for Iranian people, who have to make these moral decisions on a daily basis sometimes, and have to live with them, for good or bad.”
There’s another guard in the film who, when his approach is challenged, responds by saying “it comes from above.” I mention that it seems to me as if this man is not just talking about the earthly hierarchy, but is trying to invoke a religious justification for his behaviour. Amir is pleased that I noticed this.
“The double meaning of that, you know, that's a whole other thing. There's so many layers within that line. I show it in the imagery earlier on, like, where they put images of certain people on the wall, even at the wrestling gym, you know – so Takhti, who we all look up to, he's not the highest person on that wall. So, yeah, where is this above? That's an essay question for sure; I could talk about that forever.”
Arash, like many Iranians, finds hope in the future, Amir says. He wants a better life for his little brother.
“That's why the title, for me, is so important. I genuinely believe that in the title. A good day will come. It's just a matter of time.”
We’ve seen generation after generation of people feeling that it's their responsibility to be the ones who bring about that change. Obviously things like this happen to leaders of those movements. There's a point in the film where the coach says that he's lived under two regimes and they're all the same. I ask Amir if he thinks that change is happening nonetheless, underneath the surface.
“I would say, yeah, changes are happening. The last set of protests like that were ignited by the Mahsa Amini tragic death and the Woman Life Freedom movement that followed has had – again, it depends on perspective – some people might see it as massive changes, some people might see it as small changes, but there have been changes for sure. It might not be in the policy making at the parliament level, but it's in the people, especially in bigger metropolitan cities.
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| A Good Day Will Come |
“I talked to family members back home and they said that the hijab is in certain places is very loose now, you know? And that's the thing. When it's civil disobedience at that level, you don't have enough force, you don't have enough morality police or whatever to shut it down. So that's where it gets lost. Is it a legal change? Maybe not. Are people still getting arrested for it? They are, 100%. And there's new laws, I heard, that are being passed to counteract all that even more. But it's all for a greater good.
“The thing about the coach is that he's become this jaded character, right? Again, I don't get into his backstory as much, but I am doing in the feature. He's one of my favourite characters. He's just so complex and he's been under these two regimes and he's dealt with different things, yet it doesn't matter. It's just always going to be the same. And for lack of a better word, Arash is naïve. You know, him being young and him still believing those grand ideas, he still believes change is possible. I guess with my age as well, I still do believe that. Maybe if you ask me in 30 years, I’ll have a different answer for you. But at this point in my life, I do believe it's possible.”
We talk about the torture scene in the film, which is just audio, with a black screen.
“It’s another very layered thing,” he says. “I had lots of discussion about that scene with a lot of filmmaker friends, how to approach that, how not to approach it, what should be shown, what shouldn't be shown. Looking at other films, how they've approached it. And yeah, ultimately I landed on that black screen. Nothing is necessary visually there, you know? Everything I'm trying to communicate is through audio. And I think it's even more harrowing to just hear it and not see it.
“Originally, as they were taking him away in the prior sequence, they were going to put something over his eyes so his vision would go, and that would become a dark screen. We didn't end up doing that part, but there's a lot of that. When they take you away, they close your eyes. That was my intention, to put the audience in that perspective, in those shoes.”
I ask if he can tell me a bit about the feature.
“Absolutely, yeah. So as of now, it's the same title, A Good Day Will Come. I've been working on the script for the last 18 months now, and it's shaping up. I really hope to be able to get it made in the next couple of years. I really get into the coach’s backstory and the father's backstory. I build up Arash's arc and his brother’s arc more, and really flesh out these characters to be able to do justice to them. I really believe there is no bad character. There's no villains. We're just all human, and there's good and bad within all of us. No one's wrong because their perspective informs the way they think, the way they make decisions, and I’m really exploring all these characters and showing all that, so the audience don't judge them – they just empathise with them.”
So how does he feel about the short qualifying for an Oscar?
“It's great,” he says. “If it does go further, if it gets on the shortlist for nominations, that's all great. It just pours fuel on the feature, if anything, to get that made faster. But why I ended up making this short is, me and Navid were born in the same year. He was born in Shiraz. I was born in Ahvaz, just a few hours apart. He wrestled, I wrestled.
“The point that ends up being different is that in grade nine, I moved to Canada, and he didn't have that opportunity. So it ended up being about, okay, if I don't use my privilege that I've gained in Canada...” He trails off. “I don't need permission to make films. I don't need a permit at the script stage. I don't need notes on my cut to censor stuff. I don't need notes on distribution methods. These are the three levels that the filmmakers back home have got to go through.”
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| A Good Day Will Come |
He kept expecting somebody more established to tell the story, he says, until the point came when he realised that if he didn’t take it on himself, it might never be told.
"He was in the news at the moment. And then there's nothing, you know? And the thing about film is that it has a chance to live on for generations. So that became my driving force. I have to use my privilege. And there's a moment in the film when Arash looks at himself in the mirror and he's got to make a decision, you know? And that's me. And I have to live with that decision, whether it's good or bad.
“It comes down to my honour, and that's all. Everything internally I was struggling with. My fears. Should I do this? Should I not do this? Everything helps. Anything that happens now, I'm appreciative of it. I don't expect anything. I just want to make sure the film gets out there.
“The film has been travelling all year. Of course, I could only afford, through a travel funding grant, to go to a few of them. And all the ones that it travels to which I'm not at, I always get at least one message which is like, ‘Thank you for this film.’ If one person does that, then that's it for me. I've done my job. That's definitely the goal, to just have more people look up his name and have more empathy for the Iranian people. Everything you hear in the news is the actions of the government, and sure, there's people who work in the government, but then again, they're not talking about the Iranian people, and ultimately that's why I made this film.”
