The Things You Kill

Alireza Khatami is an Iranian director based in Canada whose first feature, Oblivion Verses, won three prizes in Orizzonti at Venice in 2017. Öldürdüğün Şeyler is his first film in Turkish, made with Canadian, Turkish, Polish and French money, and it premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance in 2025, where Khatami took the Directing Award. Canada later submitted it for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

The premise is a domestic mystery — a professor doubts what he has been told about how his mother died — and Khatami uses it as a doorway rather than a plot. Ali, played by Ekin Koç, retreats to a barren patch of land his father owns outside Ankara, hires a gardener called Reza, and the film gradually becomes a study of inheritance: what fathers hand down, what a country hands down, and how much of it a man can decline. The construction is formally slippery, built on doublings and reflections, and it asks the viewer to hold two readings at once for most of its length.

Critics took to it strongly, with reviewers repeatedly reaching for Farhadi and early Ceylan as reference points while noting that Khatami is doing something stranger than either. Ercan Kesal, a fixture of Ceylan's cinema, appears as the father. It also won Best Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival — an odd credit for a Turkish-language film shot in Anatolia, and a fair indication of how thoroughly it belongs to nowhere in particular.