Telling a story set in the country’s fourth-largest city could seem intimidating, but filmmaker Bassam Tariq has always wanted to do exactly that. “I always wanted to tell something that was from the city, that had an energy of the city,” he says.
Born in Pakistan and raised in Queens, New York, Tariq will forever consider Houston home. He moved here at age 11, living in Southeast Houston and Sugar Land before attending the University of Texas at Austin. He returned to film Ghosts of Sugar Land, a Netflix documentary about a group of friends grappling with the disappearance of a friend who had joined ISIS. Still, something told Tariq he was on the precipice of a much larger story, something much more…Houston.
It wouldn’t hit him until 2014, when his wife gave birth to their first son. She couldn’t nurse while in the emergency room. He struggled watching his baby go days without milk. “There was just this feeling of, ‘How do I get this thing that my child really needs?’” he says. “It’s also this anger with God because you see a child. You can’t help him, and he’s helpless, and you’re like, ‘Why would God do this to something that’s so innocent?… Where do I place this?’”
He started by putting it on the page, and his new film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, was born.
The movie opens with an action-packed knife fight between Muslim hitman Latif (two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali) and an unlucky stranger, then pivots to the death of Latif’s wife, Kadeja, which leaves him to care for their three children alone. The title comes from a hadith in which a man asks the Prophet Muhammad who deserves his best. The first three times he asked, the answer was the same: “your mother.”
Kadeja’s absence is felt deeply, especially when their infant refuses formula as her remaining supply of breast milk runs low. In a fit of desperation, Latif goes to great lengths to get a stash and to make good.
A Muslim who roams “with his own code,” Latif has promised the sheikh of his mosque that he’s done killing to make ends meet. But he’s caught between two antagonists: a Muslim mobster and his nephew pressuring him to carry out one more hit in exchange for his children’s safety, and a Christian pastor (John Cho of Harold & Kumar) leading a deadly crusade against the porn industry.
The film exists in part because another fell through. Tariq and Ali were once set to team up on Marvel’s Blade, but it never came together. It would have been a cool movie to make, but Your Mother was never a strategy or part of a revenge plot. “It was really about: how do we tell something that feels deeply honest and real, and how do we speak to the rage that we’re both feeling about things that are going on in our life?” Tariq says. “I couldn’t imagine anyone other than [Mahershala] to play the lead.”
Ali does the role justice, playing a conflicted killer who has sworn off violence and a father who now wrestles with his faith, even though the Islamic creed is simple: To be Muslim, one has to believe and say, “No god but God,” Tariq says. Yet his characters find themselves teetering.
Drawing from former porn star Mia Khalifa, Brazzers (a porn site co-founded, in part, by two Arab men), and the popularity of porn in Pakistan, Tariq built his character Hatty (Abubakr Ali), an influencer dubbed the king of “Habibi porn.” In the film, Hatty skewers the hypocrisy of a community that can seem prudish while acknowledging its own cynicism. “He’s unsure of where he stands,” Tariq says.
Then there’s Fatiha, Latif’s teenage daughter. Played by actress and doula Adia, whom Tariq describes as a “phenomenal light,” she’s a quieter strength, her faith also in question as she grapples with her mother’s death and the unraveling of her father’s secrets.
Seemingly the surest of all is Pastor Hwan Yoon, the righteous, machine-gun-wielding Christian “jihadi” set off by a miraculous experience. Cho delivers one of his most captivating roles yet, even as an antagonist, which put Tariq in a bit of a predicament. “The problem that we had in early tests—I’m not making this up—people liked [Hwan] too much,” Tariq says. Even his own Muslim friends were rooting for the death of Hatty in favor of Hwan. It sent Tariq back to the drawing board to make Hatty “less despicable” and more complex.
Though the film was mostly shot in Atlanta, Houston weaves in through subtle, recognizable details meant to convey the city’s flat, multicultural reality: an inverted image of the skyline, glimpses of strip malls, the sound of train tracks, a reference to the Kroger on Hillcroft, goat chops (a nod to Aga’s, the Indo-Pakistani restaurant known for the dish), and the sheer diversity of the city’s cultures and religions.
Cho has his own Houston connections. Tariq says Hwan’s shiny grillz clearly nod to Johnny Dang, the famous local Vietnamese jeweler who, before supplying iced-out mouthpieces to celebrities, came to Houston as a refugee. Cho also told Variety that Houston was the first place he lived after immigrating from South Korea. Tariq said capturing the immigrant and working-class experience was important.
“When I’ve seen Texas talked about, you always think of the West. You think of Big Bend, or you think of Dallas. But when I think of Houston, I think of Southwest Bissonnet. I think of Fiesta. … I think of really good South Asian food. … I think of these really big religious communities that are connected and also colliding with other religions in interesting and beautiful ways,” he says. “That’s my experience, and I love that.”
The film also captures parenthood in a way only a parent could. There’s the trance-like prayer Latif falls into when he hears his daughter at ease, distinctly cooing and suckling at the breast, a detail sound engineer Damian Volpe incorporated from his wife, who was nursing at the time. A burp serves as a satisfying pause before a climactic moment. There’s the anxiety of bags of breast milk slapping to the floor, spilling precious liquid gold; and the sight of Latif, covered in cuts and bruises, dodging bullets, humming and rocking side to side to soothe his daughter.
Though at odds, the characters become mirrors for one another’s uncertainties and similarities and, in the end, for grace and mercy—the one thing most religions encourage people to believe in sight unseen. “You’re forgiving somebody when they don’t deserve it,” Tariq says. “Why would somebody do that?”
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival in September and here in the city at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in October. Already, it’s earned rave reviews, with 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at press time and critics praising its blend of religious commentary and action with a heavy dose of family drama.
Beyond the title and the image of a hitman with a baby strapped to his body, you find a tender, ferocious story about forgiveness, building to a defining line Pastor Hwan utters to Latif in one of his most vulnerable moments (no spoilers). Its message: Even when it feels like no one is there for you, someone always is.
“You don’t know who they are. It could be an ancestor. It could be somebody from the future, but it all goes to something that is present,” Tariq says. “For us to remember that when it feels really dark is important.”
Where to watch
Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother will screen at the River Oaks Theatre and the AMC Katy Mills 20 starting on Thursday, October 8. The film is slated to screen at theaters nationwide on Friday, October 16.
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