Iranian-Canadian film director and screenwriter Alireza Khatami at his home in Toronto on Friday.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
Last month, during the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual Canada’s Top Ten event – in which the arts organization celebrates what it deems to be the preceding year’s best Canadian cinema – director Alireza Khatami was asked by programmers to get onstage at the Lightbox theatre to talk about his new thriller, The Things You Kill.
After his fellow Top Ten filmmakers offered semi-cute anecdotes about various production challenges, Khatami delivered what initially felt like a self-deprecating gag about how his movie kept getting rejected from festivals, from Cannes to Locarno. “Locarno, really!?” he said in seemingly mock frustration, while standing next to Sophy Romvari, whose film Blue Heron had its world premiere at the far-from-disreputable Swiss fest.
But then Khatami noted that his film also failed to make the cut at TIFF’s annual September festival, and was only belatedly being honoured now because it had won acclaim after its 2025 Sundance debut, after which it became Telefilm Canada’s submission for Best International Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. It was at this point in Khatami’s speech that the audience of filmmakers, press, distributors, producers and the festival’s own staff realized that this wasn’t some kind of comedic bit.
“I thought TIFF gives a damn about Canadian stories, but I wasn’t Canadian enough,” Khatami said to murmurs in the crowd, going on to note that his last name had been mispronounced by programmers. “Was it about me or the film?”
Sharp Canadian-Turkish thriller The Things You Kill will scar you for life, in a good way
The Iranian-born filmmaker, who is based in Toronto and is an associate professor of image arts at Toronto Metropolitan University, wasn’t done yet.
“Last year I was watching the programming mess, and I know as a filmmaker you need courage and spine, and I wish courage and spine to the programming team not to make the kind of embarrassing situation they made last year: invite a film, take it back, send it back, answer calls from donors, write about it publicly,” he continued, alluding to TIFF’s back-and-forth selection of the Oct. 7 documentary The Road Between Us. “You’re embarrassing the filmmakers of Canada. So I wish you courage, and I wish you spine.”
Khatami’s refusal to play nice and deliver the kind of platitudes expected at such Canadian arts gatherings not only felt like a breath of fresh air, but aligns perfectly with the director’s cinematic philosophy, which is daring and confrontational.
The first half of The Things You Kill, a co-production between Canada, France, Poland and Turkey, follows a Turkish professor reckoning with the sins of his father, and is slow, polite and patient in its narrative and aesthetic sensibilities. But the film’s second half, which is violent and wildly surreal in a David Lynchian fashion, rebukes expectations of what, according to Khatami, audiences might expect from a “brown filmmaker.”
Khatami's latest film, 'The Things You Kill,' won acclaim after its 2025 Sundance debut and became Telefilm Canada’s submission for Best International Film at the 2026 Academy Awards.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
“We knew right in the middle that we’re going to totally alienate the audience. We wanted the audience to say, ‘What happened?’” the director says a few weeks after the TIFF event. “I know there is an expectation of me, and if I go against the expectation I lose a lot of people off the bat. So I bring them all the way into the middle, and then I pull the rug and let them be disoriented for 10, 15 seconds. Then if they stay, it’s consent. They have decided to stay, and I have their absolute consent and attention, and I can go to really beautiful places with them.”
The film’s story of a literature professor named Ali (Ekin Koç) and his psychological unravelling is a deeply personal one for Khatami – as evidenced by the fact that the stranger who enters Ali’s life and then dangerously rearranges it is named Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the two men neatly forming the portmanteau of “Alireza.”
“The film comes from my personal histories, and the biggest challenge for me was to be honest with myself,” Khatami says of the drama, which untangles knotty ideas about contemporary masculinity and patriarchal structures.
“It’s very easy to fall into the three-act structure that tries to engineer engagement from the audience. Unfortunately, when you study in the Western tradition, all the emphasis is on that kind of engagement, because stories must sell. But I wanted to make a movie that is about a gift. Not everything has to sell. So I had to look at myself and say, the problem starts with me. It’s very easy to blame my father, my mother, society. But what about me – where am I in that structure?”
That question of place is one that Khatami was forced to wrestle with in more than a merely metaphorical fashion. At first, the director planned to shoot The Things You Kill in his native Iran, but pivoted to Turkey after the demands of Iranian government censors became too much to bear.
“It was a logistical necessity, because I refused to cut the scenes down. I’m from a Turkic tribe from southwest Iran, and that language gave me a window to the Turkish language that is spoken in Turkey. And also the culture, history are very similar, and the landscapes in Turkey were what we were looking for,” Khatami explains, noting many of his actors also spoke fluent English.
Khatami says he longs to return to Iran as a filmmaker, even if current events make that something of an impossible goal for the foreseeable future.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
“Most importantly, they were open to me coming and telling a story in their homes. They adopted me as one of their own, and helped me tell this story in Turkey. It was a very generous act from my collaborators.”
Still, Khatami longs to return to Iran as a filmmaker, even if the war launched by the United States and Israel makes that something of an impossible goal for the foreseeable future.
“History has shown that no regime change has happened through the air. I think America underestimated what’s going to happen. They talk about a short intervention and I’m sure it’s going to be months, with the cost paid by ordinary citizens,” says the filmmaker, who has family in the country.
“I will go back – it is not a hope. I refuse to let a group of people hijack my home and tell me how to make a story. I’ve tried once and I’ll try again," he adds. “This is my job as a filmmaker, to tell a story, and I’ll do my best in my very tiny, little capacity.”
Meanwhile, Khatami says that he hasn’t felt any blowback from his candid remarks at the TIFF event – and notes that The Things You Kill will be playing at the festival’s Lightbox theatre this weekend as the movie’s Canadian distributor Mongrel Media rolls the title out across the country.
“We have to speak. These are institutions. These are the spaces, and we have to have a dialogue with them. And sometimes dialogue is hard. So what? We will talk,” he says. “I want TIFF to be the best festival in the world. That’s what I want.”
The Things You Kill opens in Toronto and Montreal March 20, with additional cities to follow throughout the spring.