Is it better to live safely within the suppression of an unjust system or to risk your life for the chance of freedom? This is the question posed in Amir Zargara’s Oscar-qualifying short A Good Day Will Come.  Written and directed by Zargara, the short follows Arash (Sia Alipour), a young athlete on the cusp of professional wrestling stardom. He lives with his mother and younger brother while he trains for larger competitions at the gym under the guidance of his seasoned coach. However, when the turmoil within his country can no longer be ignored, he is forced to ask himself if he will use his platform to speak for justice or cope with the plights of his people in silence. 

The short is inspired by the tragic story of Navid Afkari, an Iranian wrestler wrongly executed in 2020 on the alleged charges of murdering an Iranian guard. Afkari maintained his innocence and admitted that his false confession to the crime was obtained by torture. His unjust treatment for speaking up against the stringent Iranian regime sparked global outrage from world organizations and leaders. 

Here the Iranian-Canadian filmmaker speaks to Deadline about the privilege of freedom and using his platform to tell hard truths. 

DEADLINE: Can you talk about your background, moving from your birthplace in Iran to now living in Canada? 

AMIR ZARGARA: Originally from the south of Iran. I was born in a city called Ahvaz. There’s a lot in that province. It’s where the oil comes from and also where the Iran-Iraq war took place, which is alluded to in the film as well. So, I spent seven years in Ahvaz and seven years in Tehran, the capital. Then the second half of my life, the last 15 years, I’ve been in Ottawa, Canada. 

DEADLINE: What was the inspiration behind making the short film? I read that initially, it would be a docudrama, and the short still feels that way. Can you talk about the change to a narrative feature instead?  

ZARGARA: The inspiration behind the short is that I wanted to make a fictional film, and the lead character is inspired by a real person. His name was Navid Afkari, and that’s essentially the genesis of the path of this film. I got wind of his story a year and a half before he was executed, as his mom was doing this campaign to garner support. So that was in my mind since then. I waited a few years after the incident happened to him. I thought other people might tackle the story, more established people within the Iranian film community. And then I just didn’t see anything come up. I didn’t want to tell the story because making any film is hard enough and making a film about your own people comes with its own extra set of criticisms and challenges. So, all that stuff aside, we came down to approach, “OK, how do I want to approach the story?” Initially, it was a docudrama. It was based on information available online based on facts either from his mouth, his family, his lawyer, second-hand, or from other inmates who had seen stuff. We ended up with a draft, but I didn’t feel like it was the story. I didn’t feel like I could build the empathy I wanted for him and the Iranian people as a whole with that type of project. So, I put that aside for a while. 

Then on a cold evening night coming back from the gym, I had this song playing by Hichkas, who’s known as the father of rap in Iran, who I’ve been listening to since middle school. It’s called “A Good Day Will Come.” I’ve heard the song many times before, but it was in that specific moment [it clicked]. The opening lines of the song are, “A good day will come that we won’t kill each other.” And that’s when I got the visual of this fictional character at the protest with his hands up, facing his own people, with the [military holding] guns, and those people are in between a rock and a hard place themselves. They’re not bad people. It’s just a mess of what that looks like. People have to make these moral decisions on a daily basis in Iran, which, sometimes in North America, you don’t even have to think about. But in Iran, the decision will either be morally more “right” or “wrong” or whatever, but then you have more personal consequences. It’s just a mess. 

DEADLINE: I think about The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a film largely made in secret set against the backdrop of the Women, Life, Freedom movement. As a consequence, the director and some of the actors had to flee Iran. For your short film, Navid’s story as a famous wrestler standing up for change was globally famous, with calls from world leaders asking for his release from prison. Was there any fear in retelling the story? And how did you work through that? 

ZARGARA: First, I should say I love [Mohammad] Rasoulof and his work. I haven’t seen his new movie because it’s not released where I’m at. But even in his last one, There Is No Evil, the moral situation is so good in everything he does. My short film is a fictional take; the names are different, and there’s a dedication at the end to Navid so that people can get the name and look up the real story. Instead of the docudrama, I just felt a lot better about this version of the story. Morally, all the struggles I was going through within myself, I just got to a point of asking myself, how strong is my why? Why do I need to create this? If my why is that strong, if I have all these privileges in Canada that the filmmakers in Iran don’t have, like Rasoulof again, and people like Navid don’t have, like “Who is going to get scrutinized?” I can protest. Really, I can say whatever I want, and I can make anything I want.

I have all this privilege, and if I’m not exercising these privileges that I’ve gained to be here… It was like I was getting into a dark place of, “OK, well then, who am I as a person?” It was hard for me to live with myself. That’s why it got to a point where I just had to accept whatever criticism the film might come with and accept all the consequences. For me, it was more important to tell this story. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. But I had to make it because it was the right thing to do, despite what could potentially happen. 

DEADLINE: How did you find Sia Alipour to play your lead? How did you work with him to create this story about this hero that has a tragic end? 

ZARGARA: I can’t thank Sia enough for saying yes to this. I don’t think we could have a movie if Sia didn’t sign up to do this project. Casting the lead was so hard for something like this. First of all, it’s hard enough to get people because everybody has ties back home. Everyone’s always afraid of doing any projects like this outside of Iran because, “Oh, what’s that going to affect?” Especially if their face is in front of the camera. I needed an actor who could act, who spoke Farsi, who ideally lived outside of Iran, who was OK with essentially not being able to go back and had the physique of a wrestler—because I don’t have enough money to pay him to get in shape [laughs]. So, there were just less and less people to choose from, and Sia was perfect. The search took eight months. But I reached out to his agent with the script, and he read it, liked it, and wanted to meet with me. When he was brought on, he brought his own team, wrestling coach and acting coach. We did a lot of Zoom meetings and talked through every scene that he was in. We talked about the character’s needs, wants and emotional mindset. He was very detailed in his questions because he wanted to understand the intention behind everything. 

DEADLINE: You filmed this in Istanbul. Was there anything particularly challenging about that? Especially putting together that large protest scene. 

ZARGARA: We loved shooting in Turkey. It was awesome. The crews are great. Everyone knows what they’re doing. They shoot a lot down there. It’s kind of like LA because they have a large film industry. As long as I knew what I was doing and I knew what I wanted, I was super prepped [so it was easy]. Me and my DP [Jelan Maxwell] from Canada, we’d talk through everything, and we had boards to communicate [with the Turkish crew], so that was the only challenge was the language barrier. But we had someone who spoke English on both sides; there was a delay in translating things into Turkish [laughs]. 

The protest scene is interesting because you would think that’s the day things would go wrong, but we were super prepped. That day went without a hiccup. And shout out again to everyone at the top-down, including our producer and production manager there. 

DEADLINE: That protest is a pivotal moment in the film. I was surprised Arash stepped out of the crowd and approached the armed military officers to get through the streets, ultimately becoming his downfall. Talk more about the composition of this scene. 

ZARGARA: We had a few different versions of that scene written and explored them all. I asked myself, “What needs to be communicated for the audience to pick up?” And there was a version where the other family members were there, too. Because of how pivotal it was, I had to make sure I explored it in various ways on the page first. Once we landed on that and even on the day, I had a lot more lines for the Molotov people originally and then me and Jelan decided what we needed to get before our filming had completed. If it wasn’t fitting into the schedule, it shouldn’t even be there. It was our first time working internationally, we just wanted to make sure we had the things we needed to make the film work. I also had another angle of the press, but then I ended up saying we didn’t need that either.  

Sia also helped because in the morning [of the shoot], there was supposed to be a shot of the crowd’s reaction after what he does, but then he was like, “I don’t think that’s needed.” And then I agreed with him on the day, and I was like, “Yep, let’s cut that.”  And then, originally, there was a lot more dialogue. That was the biggest part I struggled with because I was spoon-feeding the audience more about the contextual stuff. I show some things throughout the film with an insert or subtext, but it never overtly makes the movie. Then I decided, “It’s OK if they don’t know that.” I’m more visual. If possible, I try to make films with little to no dialogue. 

DEADLINE: What do you want people to take away from this film? 

ZARGARA: What I want people to take away is in the title. I know it could be seen as going “against” [an agenda], but I’ve talked about this with other people. I don’t know if it’s my naivety or my age, which I think is possible, but if you ask the generation before, who went to the streets, who did the revolution, they’re swearing at themselves for even going that because [they thought] something was going to be better and it’s not. Change is gradual. It doesn’t have to be gastric. Again, in the Women, Life, Freedom Movement that you mentioned earlier, there has been gradual changes, not in policy, but in the way of life in the big cities.  The wrestling in the film is about various levels of struggle. The most obvious ones are physical grappling, like wrestling and the internal grappling of: Should I say this? Should I do this or not? Everyone’s grappling with that. Everyone is grappling with the system and the regime and making decisions at every turn. But of course, the film is about whatever people want to take away from it as well. 

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]