Sometimes a guest is just right for a film festival. For example, Bassam Tariq may not have a film in theatres right now, but the filmmaker had more reasons for accepting the invite to this year’s Austin Film Festival than just a chance to revisit his alma mater of the University of Texas. He was also a panelist on From Page to Performance: Attaching Star Power to Your Script. That’s a topic he knows something about from his deep creative relationships with two of the most exciting actors working today: Oscar and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed ( Digger , The Night of , Sound of Metal , Hamlet ) and two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali ( Moonlight , Green Book , Alita: Battle Angel ).
Born in Pakistan, and raised in New York and Houston before graduating from UT, Tariq’s films have often reflected both the international and localized nature of the multitude of Muslim experiences. His documentary debut, These Birds Walk , was shot in a Pakistani orphanage, while his first narrative film, Mogul Mowgli , starred Ahmed as a British-Pakistani rapper contending with his more traditional family.
Ahmed has remained a close collaborator, as the two worked together on the actor’s Prime series, Bait , in which Ahmed plays an actor who burns his shot at becoming the next – and first British Asian – James Bond. “It takes some balls for him to do what he did because he’s kind of signed himself off from playing Bond now,” Tariq laughed. Fortunately, Bond producer Barbara Broccoli was in on the joke. “I was in the room with him as we were prepping and he had to go see Barbara Broccoli to get her blessing. There was a chance that it wouldn’t even be a James Bond thing and we were coming up with another name, but then we went, ‘This is ridiculous, because it only works if it’s Bond.’”
It was also Ahmed who suggested that Tariq used the title from another (and, the filmmaker admits, much worse) script and apply it to the story he was developing about life in a Black Muslim community. That better script – now called Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother – came to the screen due to another failed project, as Tariq was one of the filmmakers attached to the stop-start production of Blade for Marvel. Ali was supposed to play the titular vampire hunter, but when that whole project fell apart he and Tariq created the story of Latif, a Black Muslim hitman in Houston contending with his faith after his wife dies.
If it seems unusual that a Pakistani American filmmaker would look at his story from a Black Muslinm perspective, Tariq argued that it’s really the only one that makes any sense. He said, “The Islam I have learned and come to practice has been through the Black Muslim tradition. So I had to honor that.”
It was a similar situation when making Mogul Mowgli . Just because Riz Ahmed’s character is a Muslim and a second-generation migrant, that doesn’t mean Tariq’s own life experience could be directly transferred to his story. Instead, what intrigued the filmmaker were the cultural specificities of placing the story in the UK. He said, “I would never make a film about a Pakistani-American hip-hop artist because that sounds so lame to me. The struggles of what the British Muslims and British-Asian folks have gone through for three generations, and how they’ve been part of resistance movements, and at one point they were considered Black … it’s a very different history and trajectory where them being part of the hip-hop culture, it makes a lot of sense.”
Films in Western countries with Muslim leads or set in Muslim communities are a tragic rarity, and Tariq credited Alana Mayo, president of Orion Pictures, with having faith in his vision. He admitted that even friends were worried that no studio would touch a film with overt Muslim themes, especially one “that builds up to a confrontation between a Muslim Black man and a Korean Christian in a porn mansion.”
Having that backing was important, as films about Muslims in the West often revolve around terrorism. Tariq recalled recoiling from one of those films: religious comedy Four Lions , as crafted by British satirist Chris Morris . He recalled, “I was so upset when I watched the trailer, and I was like, ‘Fuck this movie,’” A few years later a friend encouraged him to finally watch it, and he did so, begrudgingly. “I pirated it,” he admitted, “because I’m not going to give a dollar to this movie.” Now, he added with slight sheepishness, it is “one of my favorite films. … I was only going to watch the first five minutes, but I kept watching it, and I watched it again, and the second time I watched it, I cried. It’s a masterpiece, and I’ve seen it now eight times, and the thing it opened up to me was that you don’t have to be from your community to tell a story that can actually resonate. But you’ve got to do it thoughtfully, and you’ve got to work really hard and make sure that you’ve brought the community in with you.”
Four Lions was also the first time he saw Ahmed in a film. “And I thought, ‘who the fuck is this guy?’” Then when Tariq moved to London to shoot Mogul Mowgli , the actor gave him even deeper insight into the specifics of the British Asian and British Muslim experience – more particularly, that there isn’t a single one, but that the communities in London are completely different to those in Manchester or Sheffield or Bradford.
Those lessons transferred to creating his cinematic version of the Black Muslim communities of Houston for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother , and much as Ahmed became his teacher for Mogul Mowgli , he credited Ali with giving him real perspective on the story he was telling. When he started preproduction, he realized that “I was bringing my own South Asian baggage, and I had to relearn, which was beautiful.”
A major part of that learning process was about wardrobe. Tariq said, “I didn’t realize how important that was until I realized how much of my sensibilities of how people would dress who were Muslim were kind of dated or just not correct. Having Mahershala lead that as Latif was really important.”
Latif’s wardrobe became an expression of the character: that being Black and raised Muslim, rather than converting later in life, made his clothes what Tariq called “a second skin.” His kufi, his shalwar trousers, his morning tunic, all speak to his Muslim heritage, while the tagelmust turban and face veil he wears in times of violence were a deliberate reference to the anti-colonial protesters and campaigners of West Africa, the Sufi liberation movements of the region, and historical figures like Omar al-Mukhtar in Libya and Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba of Senegal, who Tariq called “an incredible figure who I’ve been wanting to understand and revere.”
Having those significant figures be part of Latif’s history is quietly pivotal to the construction and external expressions of the character. Tariq noted that in Sufi traditions, “you don’t learn from books, you learn from people.” That’s something shared with two student/teacher traditions with rich cinematic histories: the Samurai and the Jedi. He said, “You have the padawan and the master, and just like that in the Sufi circles, you have the student and the sheikh, and then you as a sufi can trace your lineage all the way back to the prophet, Mohammed.”
Yet Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a film about Latif’s crisis of faith: not that he no longer believes in the existence of Allah, but that he is no longer prepared to kneel before him. In this, Tariq said, the film becomes “about the performance of piety. It’s not like he’s going, ‘I’m taking off this kufi now,’ or the priest taking off the collar. It’s like, ‘I’m going to act the part, but inside I’m not feeling this right now.’ It ends up building a story about how to surrender to the reality of what’s happened, and actually grieving.”
Just as Ahmed opened Tariq up to the regional variations of the UK, he was also very aware that Your Mother needed to be grounded in the realities of