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It all starts with breast milk.
Director Bassam Tariq was excited about fatherhood. But when his first child was born in 2012, what was supposed to be a joyous new experience quickly turned daunting after his wife was hospitalized. A newborn is already difficult — try feeding one separated from his mother and allergic to formula. “People thought I was a pervert. I was calling places, like ‘I’ll buy breast milk from you if you have it,” Tariq tells Rolling Stone. “It was a nightmare for a few days, just trying to find someone that could breastfeed my son.”
That period of intense anxiety and a desperate search for help was the spark of inspiration for Tariq’s newest film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which follows Muslim hit man Latif (Mahershali Ali) as he attempts to find breast milk for his daughter while keeping warring religious factions in his Houston neighborhood at bay. If the visuals feel vaguely familiar — Oscar-winning actor Mahershali Ali heroically poised with a sword in hand — it’s because Tariq and Ali were originally set to tackle an ambitious version of Marvel’s Blade before the project was scrapped. Audiences will no doubt see broad echoes of what could have been in Ali’s passionate and often ruthless Latif. But for Tariq, who directed three episodes of the Riz Ahmed-helmed James Bond limited series Bait and the heartwrenching drama Mogul Mowgli, the action drama is less about letting Marvel’s top brass rue the day and more about his own personal journey as a filmmaker — one where he’s finally allowing himself to work out his own frustrations around ambition, faith, and identity in America’s immigrant communities. Oh, and give Ali a sword.
After Blade fell apart, Tariq says, “I remember a lot of the fanboys were coming after me. They were like, ‘What did you do?’ There were all these rumors, and part of you wants to get involved in the discussions, but you also know that’s a trick to get [you] stuck in a vortex you’ll never get out of.” His answer:. “I put my head down. I became just a dad again. And it was a real exciting moment of [finding] what it looks like for me now that no one is over my shoulder. ‘What does it look like to write a film that’s completely mine?’”
For Tariq, it starts with making a movie that asks more questions than it answers. The film’s title is based on an Islamic hadith where a man asks what person in the world is most deserving of his devotion and love. The prophet answers, “Your mother.” And after her? The prophet answers, “Your mother” again, twice. Only on the fourth try does the answer change to “your father.” When Latif’s wife dies, he’s immediately forced to tamp down on the instincts that have provided for his family and wade unsteady into a world of bottles, transport, and dinner time.
It’s a job he feels unqualified to take on nearly as well as his wife, an insecurity immediately complicated when his regular contract employer, Mike (Laith Nakli), asks Latif to protect his nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali) from the gun-toting cult pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho). Hatty is the visionary behind a Muslim porn empire that rakes in a small fortune by delighting in the haram, making him a target for Hwan Yoon’s Church of the Divine Fire and their aim to clean sinners from the earth with worship, hellfire, and a whole lot of bullets. Latif’s imam (Giancarlo Esposito) is disappointed, his daughter Fatiha (played by a revelatory young actor who goes by the mononym Adia) is furious, and his infant daughter is pitifully hungry. This is the main thrust of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother — when the rightful aim of that threefold devotion is gone, what fills the void?
“This is a samurai film,” Tariq says plainly. “A man has to kill all the versions of himself to finally be the father that he needs to be for his family.”
Tariq, center, with Ali on set.
Jaclyn Martinez/Amazom MGM studios
Don’t get it twisted — this isn’t Blade by another name; Ali’s presence itself and his character’s skill with steel are where the similarities begin and end. But there was never a version of the film where Ali wasn’t its leading man. When Tariq began writing the script, back in 2020, the main character was always referred to as “Mahershali Ali.” “I didn’t even know him at the time,” Tariq says. “I was just like, ‘I don’t have a name right now, but I want the way Mahershala carries dignity and grief.’ He can carry these really difficult emotions, but still, there’s an element of regalness. I wanted the character to be majestic and I wanted to help create a new archetype for a Muslim man — something that I’ve imagined, but I haven’t seen on film.”
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother takes place in the suburbs of Houston — where Tariq was raised — a setting that manages to make adjoining streets of the Texas city feel like disparate universes. This is the friction that Tariq felt was a nonnegotiable for the film, factions of an immigrant community torn between assimilating into American culture and proudly celebrating its differences as loudly as possible. Faith does not only exist in the mosque — the real world is where it is tested, where reliance can falter, and where holes begin to emerge. The plot point of Hatty’s Muslim porn site was inspired by the real-life adult-film industry titan Brazzers — a site whose name reportedly comes from an inside joke about the way its Middle Eastern founders pronounced the word “brothers.”
“I connect with all the characters in different ways. They’re all different versions of me,” Tariq says. “But Hatty’s somebody I was most excited about writing because it’s a lot of my own anger that I have towards our community. The pageantry and the affectations and the way we speak at Friday prayers and the way we dress up. Hatty’s like, ‘Well, you can be as holy as you want. But I know your search history.’”
There’s one aspect of the film Tariq is still nervous about — a story choice that’s bound to divide audiences. (Spoilers ahead.) Latif bravely goes to his final battle to rescue Hatty from Hwan Yoon’s impending execution. In a world where vampire hunters do not exist, Latif’s literal actions of bringing a knife to a well-armed gun fight end exactly as you’d expect, with his prone body riddled with bullets. But it doesn’t stay that way. In the midst of her fury and rage, Fatiha prays for her father’s safe return. And Latif comes back to life, a surreal battlefield miracle that could seem out of place in a movie dominated by a realistically textured world.
“That’s where I’m nervous that we will lose people,” Tariq says. But he notes that it speaks to his own feelings about fatherhood, something the film embraces in all its messiness. “[Latif] is irredeemable to his family at that point — he’s going toward his death at the end. When he dies, he finally surrenders and then he is given a vision of his daughter praying for him. Holy shit! For me as a dad, if I could imagine that my son is praying for me after I’ve been such a dick, and he still misses me, what a gift! I don’t give a shit if I’m shot. And in that moment, Latif’s got to get to her. He has to keep going.”
This is the movie’s answer, both to questions that it shoots down and others that it implies will come up again and again and again. Life is about the people who are praying for you. And when big questions around god and faith emerge, the true solid ground is the support of your loved ones. Tariq fights back tears when he thinks of the people praying for him, remembering not just his son’s difficult first few months in the world but all of the things that had to go right — and wrong — in order for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother to have its day on the big screen. It might be Tariq’s film, but he’s under no illusion that he was alone in the process.
“I’m only where I am because of my mother’s prayers and my father’s prayers and the prayers of my community. I forget sometimes all the people that really supported me,” he says. “We probably all have this feeling of ‘What do I have to say?’ Sometimes you feel like a has been. You feel like, ‘I lost my moment.’ But everyone has people praying for them that they can’t even imagine.”
