Six Years After Starring Father Died Soon After TIFF Short Premiere, ‘Strong Son’ Director Returns With Grief Drama

Director Ian Bawa’s debut feature, Strong Son, explores the irony of a South Asian bodybuilder bulking up at a local gym just as his mental health goes downhill, and all while he cares at home for his strong-willed elderly father who is seeing his own physical health markedly weaken.

And much as the movie’s main character, Harvey Singh, played by Mandeep Sodhi, becomes emotionally broken due to his father’s outdated idea about how a real man must act – hide your emotions, don’t appear powerless and get married – Bawa himself has pushed the limits of his own storytelling vulnerability as a director to capture his real-life grief over the loss of both his parents.

“The feature itself is as truthful as a narrative and a personal narrative, without being a documentary,” Bawa tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of a world premiere for Strong Son at the Toronto Film Festival. His feature, in fact, expands on a 2020 short film, also called Strong Son, that featured Bawa’s real-life father, Jagdeep Singh Bawa, as a South Asian father giving advice to his son as he trains at a local gym, with the mantra, “My son is very strong.”

That 3-minute film, shot on Super 8, world premiered at TIFF during a pandemic-era festival online, and with Bawa, buoyed by his festival success and his father at his side, already having a feature adaptation in mind. But only three weeks later, after the first look in Toronto, Bawa’s father died from a sudden heart attack. And that shock death was followed by his mother, Pritam Bawa, passing away in 2007 after battling breast cancer and 36 years of marriage.  

“All of a sudden, my life blew up in the other way, where it was embarrassing, this movie, because it felt like people were pitying me and in my head I was dealing with grief rather than working on the feature,” Bawa recalled. The Winnipeg-based filmmakers explored his grief in another 2024 short film, My Son Went Quiet and other short films.

But his first feature, Strong Son, captures the strained relationship between Harvey and his father after moving back into the family home, only to battle severe panic attacks and crying fits as he feels the strain of being a parental caregiver. And Harvey faces his overbearing father’s disappointment most glaringly with the public humiliation of an emotional breakdown while taking part in an amateur wrestling match the bodybuilder entered to prove his physical strength.

Bawa says most every scene in Strong Son, and much of the dialogue, was taken directly from his personal experience caring for his father over the 10 years before his death, as the feature thematically explores toxic masculinity in South Asian culture. “Those words were spoken to me, as my Dad told me to stop crying, you’re acting like a woman, you’re acting like your mother. It’s one of the weird trauma moments that sit with you,” he explains.

Another source material is the original emergency phone call Bawa in real life made to paramedics on discovering his father in heart arrest, which is recreated in Strong Son the feature. “It’s all real, from the true 911 call. I have this stuff, what else am I going to do with it? And it’s his legacy at this point – no one’s going to remember my Dad, except me,” he explains.

At the same time, the sparse filmmaking style behind Strong Son — which combines stationary shots in quiet moments between Harvey and his father at home, with action-driven scenes set in the local gym – springs in part from the lead Sodhi being a bodybuilder-turned-actor since leaving India for Canada in 2011.

And Amrit Parbhakar as Jagdeep Singh only came on board for his first film lead role just one week before Bawa started production on the low-budget indie, and after an earlier actor set to play Harvey’s father dropped out. Another hurdle was Parbhakar having gone blind two years before Strong Son was shot, which called for improvisation between director and lead actor on set during rehearsals and faking an eye line when the camera, handled by cinematographer and producer Markus Henkel, rolled.

“We shot backwards. We’d start with close-ups of everyone, then do his (Parbhakar) last,” as a third assistant helped him learn lines phonetically as in effect his personal assistant. Another irony about Bawa as a filmmaker as his personal story is now ready for the world to see coming out of TIFF is he claims to be useless at talking about his inner feelings and emotions to his therapist.

“I’m an extrovert. I do like to talk, but I’m really bad at therapy,” he insists. Bawa hopes his feature, as it explores family grief and intergenerational connection, does resonate with audiences. As for what’s next for the Canadian filmmaker after his debut feature premieres in Toronto, Bawa has a couple of scripts on the go, including a horror pic.

The other is a dark comedy about a South Asian man who is balding and has wrinkles as he ages, and so decides to kidnap his illegitimate son to take him to Mexico for a skin and hair transplant. “Whatever the next one is, it has to be extremely different. Because that’s my rule in life. You have to pivot and try new things. Otherwise, what am I doing? I’m not going to learn anything,” Bawa says.