Kurdish director-writer Hisham Zaman’s A Happy Day is a darkly comedic and often poignant tale of teen refugees waiting to move on with their lives. Hamid (Salah Qadi), Aras (Ravand Ali Taha), and Ismail (Mohamed Salah) are housed in a refugee camp in Northern Norway. They are treated well but stranded in the icy mountain region far from their homeland and bored to tears. They have heard that beyond the mountains lies a beautiful city they could go to if they slipped out of the camp and made it through the frozen passes, and they spend their days planning the challenging escape. At one point, they make the break and run away, but they don’t get very far across the snow and ice of a frozen lake before they’re picked up by the local police and brought back to the center. The focus on this endeavor and their daily lives is thrown into chaos when Hamid falls in love with a beautiful newcomer to the camp, Aida (Sarah Aman Mentzoni). Hamid has no experience with romance, which makes him awkward and hesitant with Aida. She’s a fireball and pulls him along at her pace. He is a poet and shares his writing with her. 
The desperation builds to escape before they are 18, as they are safe in the camp until then, but once they turn 18, they will no longer be welcome in Norway and will be deported back to the dangerous countries they fled. This is the real refugee policy in Norway. Zaman explains the process: “Some unaccompanied minors arrive aged 15, they get a rejection letter from the government at 16, then they get a chance to appeal aged 17, but the system in place waits for them to be 18 to throw them out.“
“…He draws on his own time as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan…“
Zaman uses magical realism in A Happy Day to combine the direct story of Hamid’s experience with dreamlike moments of imagination. There is some question whether Aida is even real. Freedom is symbolized by a free-range reindeer who wanders through key scenes, though Hamid points out that, like himself, the reindeer has lost his herd. This surrealism and the grim situation are offset by a lighthearted nod to the absurd, and dark humor runs under all of it. The film’s pace is as glacial as the landscape around the camp. There’s a desperate deliberateness to the passage of time surrounded by scenic snowy mountains, with snow and ice everywhere. Watching the film is enough to induce a chill. The color palette is blue, white, and grey in the seemingly eternal winter. The cast includes professional actors as well as non-actors, including Salah Qadi as Hamid. The performances are moving and authentic across the board, which is remarkable given the experience level of some of the cast. 
This story is based on extensive research Zaman did on Norway’s controversial refugee policy, including interviews with young refugees in Norway. He also draws on his own time as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan to find a relatable way of portraying the lives and hopes of young asylum seekers. In an interview with Nordisk Film & TV Fond, he says, “Although it’s a harsh story as the three boys face deportation, they are like any other kid in the world, living every day to the fullest, with the recklessness that comes with youth. The irony is that the boys are almost more afraid to turn 18 than to be thrown out of Norway. I wanted to give warmth to this bleak situation.” He tells the story of refugees in the detention center without digging into politics or preaching about social justice. Instead, he shares the intimate daily experiences of these young people and their developing emotional lives with compassion and light humor, even in the darkest moments. 
In our teens, we all seem to be waiting for adult life to begin. In the detention center, Hamid and his friends are literally waiting and dreading, as the days and years stretch out, for a life ahead that may be filled with horror and struggle.