J Paul Johnson
The Oscar-qualified short film A Good Day Will Come, written and directed by the Iranian-Canadian Amir Zargara, loosely adapts the tragic tale of an Iranian wrestler who took up a cause greater than his own—and paid a dear price. The short stars Sia Alipour as Arash, a quiet, contemplative young athlete on the cusp of his greatest professional accomplishment. He lives with his mother and younger brother and trains at a local gym under the tutelage of his coach (Mehdi Bajestani), working towards his goal of representing his country in international competition.
Yet representing a country means more, Arash soon learns, than simply wearing its colors in competition, and that goal of sports success is easier, even, than a call to duty. Arash’s country is awash in conflict and faced with the complications of its turmoil. He is forced to wrestle with his own conscience. Will he turn a blind eye to the struggles of his people and continue his focus on his sport? Or will he instead join the cause and use his newfound platform to join—even help lead—the revolution?
That Arash is a man of principle demands the latter, yet with a tragic consequence. The narrative of A Good Day Will Come is based—and quite closely so, excepting for changing names and dramatizing events—on the story of Navid Afkari, who had been arrested in 2018 for the alleged murder of an Iranian security guard in 2018. Afkari maintained that his confession was obtained by torture and that he was innocent; the Iranian regime sentenced him to death and—in a move that sparked sparked worldwide outrage—executed him in 2020.
In tackling the story of Afkari’s wrongful death and execution, Zargara has chosen a story that needs telling. A powerful regime will silence dissent. Alipour is a confident, agile, and serious presence as the young wrestler Arash, and though A Good Day Will Come is a film clearly made with the modest resources of an independent short film, his and the other performances in the film are convincing.
At its runtime of 26 minutes, there is only so much room for character development, exposition, conflict, and resolution in A Good Day Will Come. While Zargara’s short is sufficiently convincing as a primer for Afkari’s story, it’s also just good enough to make one wish for a full-length feature film dedicated to the character, one with a bit more room to develop his personality, chart his accomplishments, and dramatize his conversion and later imprisonment. According to Zargara, the decision to fictionalize, if loosely, Afkari’s story as Arash’s was born of an intent to make the experience reflect more broadly on the societal challenges faced by the Iranian people.
A Good Day Will Come has already been selected for more than 60 film festivals in Canada, the U.S., and internationally and earned more than 40 awards and nominations. A short film’s reach is more often than not limited to festival audiences, but the story A Good Day Will Come tells is one that deserves to be heard and seen worldwide. In depicting the story of Navid Afkari as Arash, Zargara taps into what has become a global struggle for justice and dignity—in Iran, certainly, but also anywhere where voices of opposition are suppressed and even silenced.
