Alexander Farah’s short film, One Day This Kid, has stuck with me quite vividly since I saw it earlier this year. We follow a young, queer Afghan man through three different stages of his life, and we watch how he learns how to carve a space for himself in an emotionally unforgiving world. There is a sense of loneliness and loss, but he earns great affection for his own life once he has grown into his own independence. Farah plays with memory and time as we witness a young man mend his own broken heart.
The creation of Farah’s film does not only feel incredibly personal, but he reveals how the inspiration never leaves the bones of the film’s screenplay. Based on a moment of poetry from one of the most prolific artists to come out of the East Village art scene in the 1980s, the words stuck with Farah maybe even deeper than he anticipated. The process of making this short is a prime example of how art lives within us and we make a response to it when we know we are ready.
“This was inspired by a poem called “One Day This Kid” from the early ’90s by David Wojnarowicz, a Polish-American artist who’s no longer alive but wrote this in the form of a photo-text collage about a young boy growing up in a society that’s going to reject him for being gay,” Farah says. “I remember the first time I saw that piece of art in someone’s Instagram story like seven or eight years ago when he was at the Whitney [Museum of American Art] and shared it. I remember reading it and it stopped me in my tracks, and it was about a year after I had come out to not just my family and friends but also to myself.
It felt, in some ways, so cinematic, and I wrote a few drafts of a three or four minute project of using the text as voiceover. Even up until the last minute, I was basically using this text as a vehicle to interrofate and explore my own experiences growing up queer and Afghan in America while the words just lended itself to this dreamy, fragmented vignette approach these formative moments of my queerness. As the drafts of writing started to take off, I thought my story had its own legs to stand on, and it didn’t necessarily need the direct language of the poem.”
We first meet Hamed when he is a young boy dancing in his living room to Spice World, as his sister and mother look on amusingly. When his father walks into the room, he makes a disparaging remark about the film and simply walks out, but his comments undoubtedly stick with Hamed. Some parents don’t realize that the most throwaway comments can become lodged in our minds, steeped in judgement. We then flash forward to meet Hamed as an early teenager playing video games with friends and attending prayer with his father. The film ends with Hamed living his own life with a found family, his happiness rightfully claimed as his own. Unlike other stories with fragmented narratives, we always feel the tether from one age to the next.
“I used the text as sort of checkpoints in my story,” he says. “In the third act of the film when he’s feeling free and out and about in the gay club, I knew that was going to be attributed to this section in the poem where the text takes on this natural transition into something that feels more intense and it starts to give way. When you read the text, your interest piques and you wonder what is going on with this kid? Why are these things going to happen? And then, at a certain point, the jig is up, and I was hoping to borrow that same strand wheere you’re kind of teasing out these moments of curiosity and discovery. At a certain point, we kind of fast forward into this state of pseudo-acceptance where the character is now out and has a partner and is openly gay, but he has all this baggage that came with him from the first and second acts. I had to to learn to be more ruthless in the editing room. I think my first cut was around 25 minutes, but each story had a beginning, middle, and end and we had to keep moving.”
There is a visual reference to water throughout One Day. In the first act, Hamed’s father’s hand leaves his son’s grasp as they are wading in a public pool. Hamed stands there, amongst strangers, alone. In act two, he washes his arms and feet with other men in private quarters after prayer. In the final act, adult Hamed and his partner, Mostafa, submerge themselves in a moment of intimacy and romance.
“The beginning and end bookend each other,” Farah says. “This changed in the edit, but in the script, we start at the pool and then we end in the water. As I started editing, I thought I wanted to start and end in the car, because I wanted to earn the last shot as an ending. In the middle, water is used in the sense that he’s washing himself as a motif of cleansing the self or him trying to feel this escape or feel this desire to rid oneself of the feelings that he’s having. One of my friends joked that we should shoutout the ocean or the water as an extra.”
The sense of touch is paramount to Hamed’s progression into adulthood. When we are kids, holding our parents’ hands is a way of feeling comfort. When you are a closeted queer person and you have a moment of physical connection, it can send an electric charge through your body even if it’s entirely innocent and innocuous. In act two, Hamed’s uncle shows him how to play an instrument, but I couldn’t help but understand how Farah was building Hamed’s sense of self through touch.
“With the uncle at the family gathering, some people were curious as what was going on in that scene since the dad didn’t seem angry or stern, but so much feels uniquely personal to me,” Farah says. “At certain moments, even at the football scene which is super fast, there’s a sort of reaching from the friend where you think that you’re performing masculinity. It’s like an audition for manhood, and I feel like there are moments like that sprinkled out throughout the entire film. In the third act, when they are having sex, there is that whisper right by the ear or the touch on the dance floor. Those moments, and that proximity to contact, carried a lot into the second and third act.
That building block is something we also construct unconsciously when it comes to looking at adulthood in terms of what we look forward to as we get older. We all see our parents doing things that seem so “adult.”
“The close-up of the stick shift or the dad pumping the gas–as a kid, I felt, for whatever reason, that those things ring true as formative moments for myself. I remember seeing my dad at the gas station and wondering if I was ever going to be able to do that, and then you see all these gay memes about gays not being able to drive or parallel park.”
In the final moments of One Day, Hamed is in the car when he listens to a message from his father. Massey Ahmar, as adult Hamed, does so much in an unbroken take that you find new tinges of heartbreak and courage with every viewing. He’s remarkable. It reminds us of how much we yearn to be loved unconditionally.
“We did that scene in four takes, and the last take is the one I used,” he says. “You have to remember that he’s done three takes of letting it all hang loose and he’s totally going for it on every one. There’s something about his character and the level of restraint that he’s had to exercise in his life where he can feel very free but is very mindful of his actions. There is that moment in the park where he sees the other people praying, and that’s what sort of prompted me do use the more restrained take with him. Mostafa [Shaker], who playes Waleed, wasn’t scripted to reach over [and touch him], but he was feeling it in the moment. It was natural to have that moment of acknowledgement to his partner, even it was off screen. In this moment (and of course, this can change as often as the tides), I am developing more of an inclination to restraint in cinema. It encourages me to lean in and fill in some of the gaps with my own experiences. There is a time and place to let it all totally loose, but in the editing room, it felt more intuitive to use that take.”
One Day This Kid is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.
