Alexander Farah’s ONE DAY THIS KID is in the midst of its Academy Awards campaign. The seventeen-minute short, which won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW in March, is now making the rounds with Oscar® Academy Awards voters following its Toronto International Film Festival premiere last autumn.
Shot across British Columbia from Maple Ridge to Vancouver on 35mm film, the film follows Hamed, a first-generation Afghan Canadian navigating queerness and family expectations. Shot on 35mm in British Columbia with an entirely BC-based cast and crew, the film explores queer identity, family expectation, and the fragmented memory of becoming yourself.
Farah, who wrote and edited the piece, constructs meaning through small gestures rather than declarations. The casting was unconventional. Production distributed flyers at Vancouver community gatherings, eventually discovering Elyas Rahimi through a former classmate. He performs alongside his real sister Tahera and mother Roohafza, lending the work an intimacy that feels observed rather than performed.
That authenticity caught the attention of Andrew Scott. The Irish actor, fresh from Berlin’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, personally selected the film for his curated showcase at SXSW as part of Redbreast Whiskey’s “Unhidden” platform—an initiative designed to spotlight overlooked talent in independent cinema. Scott’s endorsement carried weight beyond the festival circuit.
The title references David Wojnarowicz’s 1990 artwork Untitled (One Day This Kid…), but Farah has shaped it into something distinctly local—a story about the particular pressures of navigating both immigration and sexual identity in Canada.
Cinematographer Farhad Ghaderi shot the film across Vancouver locations, with production design by Adriana Marchand. Producer Joaquin Cardoner led the project alongside executive producers Shelby Manton and Martin Glegg, with additional producing from Mojean Aria. The production brought together Vancouver’s Wallop Film and BOLDLY with Nimruz Official, Section 80, and Tempomedia.
The SXSW jury described it as “exquisite and soulful,” noting how it weaves “the cultural imprint of Islamic immigrant upbringing into the fabric of everyday queer experiences.” As Oscar season begins in earnest, ONE DAY THIS KID offers something increasingly rare: a film that trusts its audience to lean in rather than demanding their attention.
ONE DAY THIS KID is now available for consideration on the Academy Awards Screening Room for members. Viewers can watch the film on Crave (Canada) and The Criterion Channel.
