It was hard for me to fully wrap my head around the fact that ‘Any Day Now’ is Hamy Ramezan’s first feature film. This 80-some minutes story of an Iranian boy and his family, awaiting their fate as refugees in Finland is so profoundly perfect that I imagined a seasoned filmmaker at its helm. Or at least one who had worked out his unconventionally fresh narrative style over many works before this one. Instead, Ramezan has managed a quiet, full length masterpiece on his first go, having made only three short to mid-length films before ‘Any Day Now’.
What makes his feature debut so wonderful in my book is how far from the common narrative of how the current story of the refugee crisis Ramezan’s work travels. Like his fictional close knit family, their disciplined rituals which show love for one another as soon as the sun rises and day after day, Ramezan carefully weaves a story of childhood but also hope, and love — the kind Rumi talked about in this verse:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
I wasn’t surprised to find out that the filmmaker’s own story shares some parallels with his protagonist, Ramin. In the director’s Q & A of the film’s press kit, Ramezan admits, “We escaped the Iran-Iraq war when I was seven. I still remember the feeling of excitement and my hunger for adventure. For me, it still feels like yesterday; that feeling of despair I had because I could never learn my fake Turkish name and our unnatural family history – the one my father and his brother wrote on a piece of paper for everyone to remember. Our parents had to be honest with us, they had to tell us that we would be hanged if we failed.” For Ramezan, the story had a happy ending in Finland, “My first memory is from Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. We were warmly welcomed with smiles and flowers. Outside the airport, I was amazed to see Mercedes’ being used as cabs. …I was in love with our new home. I still remember the study desk where I spent most of my time sitting and learning the new language. People used to say the language was complicated to learn. It took me a mere six months to speak it with an accent but with such self-confidence that I could translate ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ for my parents every day.”
Filmmaker Hamy Ramezan, photo by Meeri_Koutaniemi
Apart from the leading “boy”, played to vulnerable perfection by Aran-Sina Keshvari, the film features Shahab Hosseini — best known to international audiences for his roles in Asghar Farhadi’s two international Oscar winners ‘A Separation’ and ‘The Salesman’ — as the imperfect but wonderful head of the household, Bahman Mehdipour. Even at his worse, I secretly wished for a father like Bahman.
To complete the family are Shabnam Ghorbani as the mother and Kimiya Eskandari as little Donya — a character who becomes the epicenter in the climax of the film simply by her presence. The supporting cast of Finnish actors is also wonderfully human, even the immigration guards if you can imagine that. Well, actually see for yourselves below.
Courtesy of Aamu Film Company, photo @ Sami Kuokkanen
Truly, you’ll have to watch this gem to realize why I’m so taken with it, and probably why the Berlinale Generation juries didn’t award it top prize. If a film ever looked at refugees as human beings, to be considered for their feelings and humanity and not their “oh, poor them” quotient, ‘Any Day Now’ is that film. And until we catch up with Ramezan’s vision and experience, we can’t truly hold a serious conversation about it.
In Ramezan’s own wise words, a perfect way to end this piece, “I believe that every Iranian, in one way or another is an immigrant right now. They have been immigrants for quite some time. But I don’t feel acting as an immi- grant needs to be the experience. Being an immigrant is a challenging situation like any other problematic situation. You have to survive it in one way or another. Or you won’t.”