Canada’s Oscar Contender ‘The Things You Kill’ Has Alireza Khatami Tackling Patriarchy: “I Know Where The Pain Is”

Iranian-Canadian Director Alireza Khatami recalls shedding tears of joy when first told his Turkish-language revenge thriller, The Things You Kill, had been picked as Canada’s best shot for the 2026 best international feature Oscar.

But his emotions didn’t flow, as many assumed, from possibly walking a red carpet into the Academy Awards to bring a statuette back home to Canada. “A lot of people thought it’s because, ‘oh, you’ve been selected.’ ‘No,’ I told them. The emotion is because now (Canada) is home,” Khatami tells The Hollywood Reporter.

For an itinerant director who left his native Iran in his youth to make films around the world — including in France Chile, Malaysia, Taiwan, Lithuania —  and believing each country was his home while there, being suddenly picked to fly the flag for Canada is a game changer. “Now I’m representing an entire industry here. You can’t say ‘goodbye.’ This is my home now,” Khatami, who is also an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, explains.

But becoming Canada’s international film Oscar contender called for working the refs after The Things You Kill won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic competition when premiering in Sundance.

Telefilm Canada, which coordinates the selection process for the country’s Oscars submission, at first disqualified the buzzy Sundance breakout for being a minority coproduction between Canada, France, Poland and Turkey. So Khatami opened the Academy’s rule book for the international film category to discover a multi-passport coproduction was no barrier to getting his film in the Canadian conversation for possible awards-season glory.     

Eventually the jury selectors for Telefilm Canada agreed and voted to put the Turkish-language family drama into  the mix for 98th Academy Awards. Khatami’s psychological thriller that critiques patriarchy for sparking generational family trauma, and which is set in and shot in Turkey, centers on an enraged professor, Ali, played by Ekin Koç, who seeks vengeance for his mother’s suspicious death.

That leads Ali to coerce his enigmatic gardener to brutally murder his bullying father, played by Ercan Kesal, for abusing his wife during their marriage. But first Khatami, a former assistant director for Iranian best foreign language Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, creates a slow-burn family drama about ordinary and modern Iranians that only gets deadly with a surreal revenge plot mixing fantasy and realism.

He puts his simmering narrative pacing down to avoiding expectations about Iranian arthouse cinema. “Whatever movies I do, whether in Chile, Taiwan or Malaysia, people look at me as Iranian. They always expect me to make a politically-charged film about human rights, or make dramas about a Muslim woman who struggles with her sexuality,” Khatami insists.

So early on in The Things You Kill, Khatami lulls his audience into a false comfort as he slowly builds tension through the unfolding complexities of a family drama. That’s until long-buried family secrets surface to unleash a hellish revenge plot.

“I don’t want you right off the bat to say, ‘Oh my god, this guy is doing something really horrible.’ I want you to know I can take you to a much more interesting place, come with me. Trust me for half an hour,” Khatami explains. It’s only with the sudden death of his mother that we begin to see Ali’s otherwise perfect world implode as his marriage and work as a professor unravels.

In a series of mirror shots as metaphors for self-examination, a self-doubting Ali has to look within himself and doesn’t like what he discovers. “The self-negotiation now begins,” which leads to Ali facing the world with a clear-eyed understanding of his father, to whom he seeks revenge.

For his murder mystery, Khatami didn’t formally audition his lead actors. He just asked everyone if they had ever imagined killing their father. Only one actor said they hadn’t, but as a teenager had envisioned killing their mother. “I said you’re in. You have that impulse in you, those dark thoughts. Now you show me the way. How would you do it?” Khatami recounted.  

For Canada, the Oscar contention for The Things You Kill has effectively moved its film industry one step closer to the country’s cultural mainstream by reflecting the breadth of Canadian multicultural experiences, especially for immigrant communities. And the thriller offers a Turkish language alternative at the multiplex for homegrown Canadian films mostly shot in the English and French languages.

“The funny part is I got so many calls from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) filmmakers who were in tears telling me they never thought they’d make a film that Canada would put forward. Now they have hope, which I’m extremely happy about,” Khatami insisted.

But bringing more clarity and consistency to Canadian eligibility rules for the Oscars was only part of the obstacle course the director faced when completing his latest movie. The Things You Kill was originally set up to shoot in Iran after Khatami had been away from the country for 18 years, and had a full cast, a production crew and locations scouted.

But then infamous Iranian film censors had their say. “The censorship office kept insisting on taking out the act of killing a father, because in Abrahamic religions it’s always the son who dies at the hand of the father, and not the other way round,” Khatami explained.

But rather than compromise on his vision, the director made the difficult decision to start over again and shift production to Turkey. “I didn’t want to let the film die. I’d been working on it for six years,” Khatami said. Turns out he had shifted an Iran-set movie elsewhere before with his debut feature, the Spanish-language Oblivion Verses, which bowed in Venice.

“My first feature was written for Iran. We couldn’t do it there. I took it to Chile. We made the film Chilean and everyone thought it was a Chilean movie – and I don’t even speak Spanish,” Khatami explained. His producers on The Things You Kill were initially wary of making the film in Turkey.

They reasoned major film festivals routinely embrace Iranian directors and their films, but an Iranian Canadian who shoots a film in Turkey risks ending up with an orphan film. But that didn’t stop Khatami in his tracks.  

“I’ve been running between countries for so many years, that every time I make a film, I’m genuinely thinking, this is the last time. So I take all the risks with it. I’m like, who cares? I’ll risk it,” Khatami said.   That devil-may-care attitude on The Things Youi Kill extended to his film set in Turkey.

“There were sequences that my DP (director of photography) didn’t want to shoot, my producers didn’t want to shoot. They said no one shoots it that way. This won’t work. I responded: ‘It’s going to work,’” Khatami recounted. “In that sense, it’s a blessing when you make a film thinking this is the last one. It’s liberating in a way.”

But for all his singular vision behind the camera, Khatami also had the humility to know he has to collaborate to make a film in Turkish, Spanish or any other language he barely knows, much less speaks.

“If I want to make a film in a culture, in a language, it shouldn’t be my film. It should be a film. And I invite everybody to bring a piece of their heart to this and change the film along the way. It cannot only be my film, right?” he explained. Actors especially especially get wide latitude from Khatami to bring their characters to life on the big screen.

“I allow them a lot. Here is the space. You tell me how this works for you. Because if the actors don’t believe it, nobody will,” Khatami said. But now that The Things You Kill is in theaters, including with a U.S. release kicking off Nov. 14 via Cineverse, the Canadian-Iranian director acknowledges one more personal demon on his shoulder.

He dreads his movie about a son avenging his abusive father will be seen by his own father, who was 21 years old when Khatami was born. “He has not seen any of my films. Out of love, I don’t want him to see this,” the director reveals.

Though his father is now older and forever doting on his grandchildren, Khatami adds: “I know what kind of childhood he had. My heart breaks for him. Even though he acts this way, I know where the pain is. When I was younger, I had no empathy. Now it’s okay. I understand you.”

Khatami produced The Things You Kill alongside Elisa Sepulveda-Ruddoff, Cyriac Auriol, Mariusz Włodarski and Michael Solomon.