Let’s assume that Richard Harmon is the product of excellent parenting. The 22-year-old actor insists on paying for lunch when he meets with the Straight at the Nelson the Seagull restaurant on Carrall Street. (“I wanted to seem like I’m cool,” he says of the venue, with an ironic shrug.) It also transpires that Harmon thinks his iPhone is a pain in the ass (good call); he raves about 1920s country bluesman Furry Lewis; and he has his favourite line from the 1951 film Scrooge tattooed on his foot. “To remind me to do something good once in a while,” he says.

None of this would be relevant to a portrait of the Vancouver-based film and TV star (whose key role in the sci-fi series Continuum is giving him global cred) if it weren’t for his part in this year’s Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth. For 16 years, R2R has committed itself to quality international cinema for the younger set, admirably resisting the cynical product that comes out of Hollywood (and augmenting its screenings with workshops, panels, and filmmaking courses).

Harmon takes a starring role in the Langley-shot feature If I Had Wings, which opens this year’s event at the Vancity Theatre on Friday (April 4). He plays a blind teen determined to join his school’s cross-country running team in the quietly uplifting movie, which happens to have been directed by his dad, Allan Harmon. Sister Jessica also takes a key role, while mom Cynde Harmon scores an executive-producer credit for her dominant part in getting the movie on-screen.

“She fought for that script for five years,” says Richard Harmon, who readily admits that he avoided working with his family for a long time. “I’m very prideful. I’m working on that. But growing up, I didn’t want anyone to think that I got to where I was because of my parents being in the industry. I hid from it like you wouldn’t believe.”

Although this family affair certainly provides a pleasing symmetry to the goals of the festival—“Now I’m proud of them and they’re proud of me, and that’s the way it should be,” Harmon offers—it was the role itself that drew him in. “He’s not a psychopath, which is what I usually play,” says the actor, whose recent film work included a homicidal frat boy in Karen Lam’s Evangeline. “This was a nice kid, and he didn’t need to take power in any of the scenes. It was a challenge to hold myself back.”

Since Harmon’s laserlike eyes are probably his most immediately magnetic feature, playing blind was an even greater test. “That’s how I get my roles! The secret’s out!” he exclaims with a laugh. “But I caught myself a few times. ‘You can’t look ‘em in the eye.’ ”

Harmon got the payback he was hoping for (all the Harmons did) when If I Had Wings won the best-film award at the Kamloops Film Festival last month. The audience reaction, he says, “made me and my sister cry”. Harmon adds that he enjoys a good sob once in a while, like any well-adjusted male. See that? Good parenting.