Alexander Farah | One Day This Kid / 2024

a necessary separation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexander Farah (screenwriter and director) One Day This Kid / 2024 [18 minutes]

 

Canadian Afghan director Farah presents a truly beautiful and loving portrait, influenced by the photograph and writing of the same title by gay artist David Wojnarowicz.

     Unlike so many works wherein a young gay boy grows up in a culture that is strongly opposed to and alien from the modern gay world, which often end up in violence and terror, Farah’s work explores a father (Aydin Malekooti) and son (the young child played by Elyas Rahimi, the teenage son performed by Mahan Mohammadinasab, and the adult Farah acted by Massey Ahmar), who grows up in a rather loving atmosphere.

     It is clear, like so many fathers of all religions, that the father has clear notions of how his son should behave, and strongly protests for religious reasons the mother’s (Roohafza Hazrat) more open attitude when it comes to her son’s encounter with Western notions of pop culture—in one scene, he grows angry when observes the Farah as a young boy dancing along with scantily dressed performers on TV.

    The father teaches the boy to play a traditional rubab (a lute-like version often described as the “Afghan guitar”), regularly attends the mosque with him, shows him how to swim, and even takes the boy with him to the sauna (where he is disturbed the boy has remained alone in the steam room with elderly naked men). But basically, these are the common patriarchal and heteronormative values of most American fathers of Canada and the US.

   Yet, as Farah grows older he finds himself more and more attracted to other boys, and finally as a teenager attending clubs and dances of which his father would not at all approve. Like many young gay men, but perhaps in a slightly more exaggerated manner, Farah begins to pull away from the family until finally as a young adult, now with a full-time lover, he has clearly left his family behind, vacationing with his lover instead of returning home.

     Love between father and son, however, remains as we recognize in a phone message from the father, begging the son to return home, declaring that they are not enemies, and suggesting that he is close to death. Whether or not Farah dares to make the trip home is left up in the air at film’s end.

    But the focus in this quite tender and beautiful film is not on the divides between father and son, or even the gaps between the culture in which Farah grew up and the gay world which he eventually comes to inhabit, but on the gradual realizations of difference, the subtle changes in the child’s focus as he grows up, and his development, sometimes arriving in sudden lurches, of the curious and obedient child into the seemingly healthy adult he becomes.

     Yes, there are tears for the loss of the closeness with his father, moments of quietude in his otherwise basically happy life. But there is not one moment of stated hate, rejection, and isolation. The alterations of child to man are those of most gay people, even those without the vast gap of the Arab culture and that of contemporary Canadian gay life. We sense these differences in Farah’s adult sadness as he witnesses a sudden appearance on the street of a traditionally dressed Afghan father and son, in brief visual memories of the past, and in that last painful cellphone message; but the process that this excellent director presents is an apparently natural one instead of an argumentative and forced separation.

     It is perhaps the inevitability of the changes in this “kid” that makes this such a wondrously quiet and sensitive film, blessed with one of the most beautiful child actors imaginable in the wide-eyed Elays Rahimi.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).