Canada’s ‘integral role’ in Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill

Writer-director Khatami and producer Michael Solomon discuss the Sundance film's journey through location changes and economic instability.

Telefilm Canada provided an eleventh-hour save for Alireza Khatami’s coproduction The Things You Kill.

“In the grand scheme of things, the Canadian budget on [The Things You Kill] is very small, but Canada played an integral role,” producer Michael Solomon tells Playback Daily.

According to Solomon, the Canadian portion of the France/Turkey/Poland/Canada coproduction was essential in both the creative portion of the film through Khatami, who is also the film’s editor, as well as the film’s post-production.

The autofictional thriller will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday (Jan. 24). It follows a university professor who attempts to convince his gardener into killing his father after the suspicious death of his mother.

Khatami, a university professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, became a Canadian resident in 2019, a permanent resident in 2021 and is on the way to Canadian citizenship. He released his debut feature Oblivion Verses in 2017 at the Venice Film Festival where it won three awards including the Venice Horizons Award for best screenplay.

“[Khatami] came to Canada and, I think overnight, raised the bar for Canadian cinema,” says Solomon. “His filmmaking language is unparalleled.”

The minority Canadian coproduction was initially planned to be filmed in Iran in the summer of 2022. However, Iranian officials took issue with the script, especially the portrayal and fate of the father, and the film was shut down just as the team had begun preparing to finance.

“In the east, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the killing of the son is the narrative. Abraham sacrifices Ishmael,” says Khatami. “The reverse has never happened … It’s a huge taboo.”

Solomon, who is a producer on the film for Montreal’s Les Films Band With Pictures, told Playback Daily they had sent a funding application to Telefilm at that time, but rescinded it when filming in Iran was denied. Solomon reapplied for Telefilm in 2023 after the film was better situated in Turkey.

Along with Solomon, The Things You Kill is produced by Khatami through his Toronto-based prodco Tell Tall Tale, Elisa Sepulveda Ruddoff for France’s Fulgurance, Cyriac Auriol for France’s Remora Films and Mariusz Włodarski for Poland’s Lava Films. Turkish prodco Sineaktif is also a producer on the film. Mongrel Media is the film’s Canadian distributor, Solomon told Playback Daily, while Brussels-based Best Friend Forever is the international sales agent.

The Things You Kill, Khatami’s third feature, is financed by Telefilm, the Polish Film Institute, Arte Cofinova and Eurimages. It is supported by Ile-de-France, the World Cinema Fund, the Torino Film Lab and Canadian federal and Ontario tax credits.

In the two weeks that Khatami had left in Iran, he teamed up with fellow Iranian director Ali Asgari to make Terrestrial Verses. The film features nine stories of Iranians struggling against oppressive cultural norms and government bureaucracy. One of the vignettes follows a film director named Ali whose script is denied filming rights. This scene, according to Khatami, was around 70% of the actual conversation regarding The Things You Kill. Terrestrial Verses premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and had a limited theatrical run in the U.S. Brooklyn-based KimStim is the film’s North American distributor.

Following the Turkey relocation, Khatami says he had been looking forward to working with Turkish actor and filmmaker Ercan Kesal with the rest of the cast coming together organically.

“The script made it easy. Everybody who read the script wanted it to be made,” says Khatami (pictured left) “We had no issue attracting talent, even though we had [very] small budgets.”

The Things You Kill stars actors well-known in Turkey: Ekin Koç (Tas Kagit Makas), Erkan Kolçak Köstendil (Simarik), Hazar Ergüçlu (Benim Dünyam) and Kesal (Çukur).

However, this meant that the film’s script needed to have some small updates to be considered a Turkish film as opposed to an Iranian one.

“It is no longer an Iranian film,” says Khatami. “It is a Turkish film in a Turkish language which is situated in a particular moment of history and has something to say about the region.”

Production on the Turkish-language film began on July 7, 2023 with the film wrapping on Aug. 8.

Despite the film being able to shoot, The Things You Kill faced other issues in Turkey as the country was dealing with an unimaginable tragedy, followed by a pivotal election.

In February 2023, Turkey was hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake with more than 50,000 people confirmed dead as a result. In May, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the Turkish presidential election. The international market’s response to Erdoğan’s victory, following the earthquake, led the Turkish lira to hit a record low, causing costs and salaries in the country to skyrocket.

These major shifts forced the film’s European partners to reallocate some of the funds that were meant for services, mainly versioning and delivery, to Turkey. This forced The Things You Kill to move more of the film’s post-production from Europe to Canada than was originally planned, with Toronto’s Urban Post Production taking up the mantle. This bumped Canada’s share of production, the smallest of all the co-producers, up to around 20%, according to Solomon.

“Telefilm played a huge role in tracking the project, [its] needs and always staying within the guidelines of their investment,” says Solomon. “[Telefilm] really supported the project when we were at our most vulnerable.”

Telefilm’s new coproduction treaty with France also proved essential for The Things You Kill. The previous agreement stipulated that any Canadian minority coproduction had to represent at least 20% of the film’s budget. The new agreement, which was signed in July 2021 and came into effect May 1, 2022, lowered that threshold down to 15% for films.

The film benefitted from a second large change from Telefilm. In November 2021, Telefilm announced that it would be updating its production-language requirements to allow funding for films that are not in English, French or Indigenous languages.

The organization had faced criticism surrounding its language policies and created a diverse languages subcommittee to draft the new criteria over the summer of 2021.

“Until recently, Canada was not very open to non-English, non-French, non-native speakers, so that discriminated against a lot of us,” says Khatami. “But the relationship between institutions in Europe makes it much easier.”

Sundance runs until Feb. 2.

Image courtesy of the Sundance Institute; photo by Bartosz Świniarski