Try to picture it: It’s 2014, and first-time father Bassam Tariq is on the streets of New York City looking for breast milk for his newborn. The filmmaker’s wife, Aisha, had just given birth to their first son when she developed a serious infection and was admitted to the intensive care unit.Unfortunately for Tariq, their newborn wouldn’t take to formula, leaving him to navigate those early days of parenthood on his own. With his baby strapped to his chest, he frantically searched the city for breast milk while confronting the possibility that his wife might not recover. It was one of the first, and hardest, tests of his newfound role as a parent.“At that moment, you’re a first-time dad, your wife’s in the intensive care unit, and you can’t speak to her,” Tariq recalled to me. “You don’t know what’s going on with her, if she’s going to make it or not.”“It’s that desperate moment,” he continued. “I found myself really feeling angry at God, because I was like, ‘I’m trying to do everything right, and this is what you do? You’re taking away that one person that could actually help this child.’”Today, Tariq says his son is healthy, and so is his wife. Once she recovered, she could finally nurse their baby. But the haunting memory of nearly losing the person who would have left him to deal with parenthood alone has stayed with the filmmaker ever since, if his poignant drama “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is any indication.Inspired by the writer-director’s own tragedy, “Your Mother” follows Latif (played by Mahershala Ali), a devout Muslim hitman and newly widowed father, who’s suddenly left to care for his three children, including his newborn daughter, after his wife dies unexpectedly. When the stash of breast milk she left behind begins to dwindle, Latif sets off on a desperate journey across Houston to find a way to feed his infant, as he reckons with the daunting reality of figuring out parenthood alone, just when his children need him most.Jaclyn MartinezMahershala Ali, Adia and Jahleel Kamara star in Bassam Tariq’s “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”Right now, Tariq is savoring the moment. He knows that soon enough, his latest film baby will no longer be his to fuss over. After its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the action-thriller starring Ali will belong to the critics, cinephiles and Marvel faithful, all of whom will have their own verdicts on his religious samurai film and, inevitably, the version of Ali that never quite made it to the MCU.It’s no secret that Marvel fans wanted to see the Oscar-winning actor wield a sword as the iconic vampire hunter Wesley Snipes made famous in 1998’s “Blade,” just as Marvel announced seven years ago onstage at Comic-Con. Ali, now 52, has been every bit as frustrated by the reboot’s tortured development, marked by delay after delay and a revolving door of directors, including Tariq, who was originally attached to helm the film before eventually departing. Marvel has since pulled “Blade” from its release calendar.As Ali said in a GQ interview published in July, MCU fans aren’t getting any closer to seeing the film come to life, at least not with him as the lead: “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”Tariq did the same after he left the film, returning to the passion project he’d been mulling over before Marvel Studios came calling in 2021, which reunited him with Ali. Now, with the film ready for its TIFF debut, the filmmaker is anxious to finally hand it over to a big audience, knowing that’s when, as he puts it, they “really give ownership.” But until then, he’s enjoying this moment of quiet.“The thing that I’m learning to do,” Tariq told HuffPost over Zoom, “is to just hold on to the things that I learned from [the film], because you never know how critics are going to respond to it. I think I have a sense, but you don’t know. So what I can get from it, at least, is what I learned through the experience of making it. So if things go kind of pear-shaped at the premiere, at least I can look back at my notes and be like, ‘OK, this is what I got out of it.’”Jaclyn Martinez/ Amazon MGM StudiosMahershala Ali stars in Bassam Tariq’s “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” as Latif, a devout Muslim and widowed hitman who, after his wife’s sudden death, is left to raise their three children on his own.A Personal Tragedy Sparked The Idea For The Director’s Moving Film “I think parenthood is something that you juggle a lot,” Tariq said of the inspiration for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.” “You have so many spinning plates at any given moment, and I felt like that just felt totally correct.”The idea for the story came to Tariq during the early days of the pandemic, when quarantine gave him, like many of us, more time than usual to reflect on life — particularly the feeling that his was going in a very different direction than he had expected.“I just made my first feature film, ‘Mogul Mowgli’ with Riz Ahmed, and we premiered at Berlin [International Film Festival],” Tariq recalled. “It was like this awesome premiere, and everyone’s like, ‘Everything’s gonna change for you.’ And then the pandemic hit a week later.”“Everything shut down,” he continued, “everything changed for us. I’m now sitting here doing meetings while I’m homeschooling my kids, and I’m like, ‘I’m supposed to be a big filmmaker. What am I doing? What is this life?’ So, [for the film] it kind of felt like, ‘What’s an interesting story about a man who thought he was on one journey and then has to go on to another?’”Courtesy of Amazon MGM StudiosJohn Cho as Pastor Hwan Yoon with Ali’s Latif in a scene from “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”That’s where things take a turn in “Your Mother.”Following his wife’s death, Latif steps back from his contract killer duties to care for his family, much to the dismay of his boss, an underground kingpin named Mike (Laith Nakli). Mike is also the uncle of Haddy (Abubakr Ali), a troublesome, lewd content producer who suddenly needs Latif’s protection after drawing the attention of the radical Pastor Hwan Yoon (an impressive John Cho). When the dangerous Christian minister sets his sights on Haddy for his next “cleansing,” Latif gets pulled into a religious war that forces him to reckon with his own faith and conflicted morals.As a self-proclaimed fan of action flicks, Tariq couldn’t help but channel his own personal experience into the kind of story he’d always loved, taking inspiration from films such as 1999’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.”“When I watched it a long time ago, there was this feeling where I was like, ‘Oh, there’s this man that lives in an urban environment that wants to follow some kind of ancient code that he lives by,’” said the director. “And I was like, oh, that’s like being Muslim in America, where you’re following a set of codes that feel a little different from the rest of everyone else around you.”That idea of living by a strict code also extends to Latif in the film, as he refuses to use guns and limits his kill targets to those he thinks the world would be better off without.But unlike most action films, “Your Mother” doesn’t indulge in senseless violence to get its point across. The film’s brutality is always in service of a deeply nuanced story about grief, fatherhood, and the power of grace and mercy. For Tariq, that distinction matters.“Audiences love catharsis, right?” he said. “But I feel like we’re seeing so much death every day on our feeds, whether it’s killings here [in the U.S.] of unarmed people by police, or when we see what’s happening abroad around the world. I think violence in film has to mean something if we’re going to use it.”Perhaps that’s what makes the more visceral moments in “Your Mother” so effective, finally putting Ali’s sword training from “Blade” to work — though Tariq had always envisioned his protagonist wielding the same weapon.“Everything is inspired by something. There always was a feeling of that, and during ‘Blade,’ I did take up sword training myself,” he said, noting that the notion of a sword serving as an extension of its wielder felt particularly fitting for Latif.“As you wield a sword, it is how you operate in the world,” Tariq noted. “And the other thing about a sword is you have to strike with intention. It’s not like with a gun, where you can go all willy-nilly like bam, bam, bam, bam. For someone that’s going to then kill someone, it’s like they’re striking with intention … That’s the thing with Latif, where it’s like, ‘If this is the path that I’m going to walk, then I shall walk it right; clearly knowing that when I decide that someone is going to be killed, that they deserve it.’”Religion Plays A Central Role In This Story About A Struggling Man Of FaithThe consequences of those choices in “Your Mother” often lead Latif to sobering revelations about himself, creating space for something some action films rarely explore: mercy.Tariq knows that theme may not be as cinematically alluring to action fans as retribution or vengeance, and the explosive violence that often ensues. However, he believes it’s just as powerful in telling this story of a troubled man “who has to kill all these versions of himself to be the father that his kids need him to be.” That inner battle is why faith and religion play such central roles in his film.“The concept of God and mercy are so connected because it’s almost like they can’t exist without each other,” the filmmaker explained. “Mercy is to be forgiven when you don’t deserve it. Like when you see people forgive the killer of somebody. You’re just like, why would you do that?”“It’s something bigger that can’t be explained,” he continued. “An unseen thing … the act of even forgiving somebody when they, quote-unquote, don’t deserve it is a miracle; a miraculous thing. So I think I’ve been curious about what that looks like.”Jaclyn MartinezAs in his latest film, religion has remained a strong throughline in Tariq’s past work: “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been trying to unpack my own understanding.”Curiosity has always been central to Tariq’s filmmaking career. In 2010, he took off on a road trip for “30 Mosques in 30 Days,” traveling through 30 states to document the stories of Muslims across America. His 2019 short “Ghosts of Sugar Land” then shifted the focus toward a group of suburban Muslims grappling with guilt and grief after their close friend disappeared and was suspected of joining ISIS. Then came 2020’s “Mogul Mowgli,” which followed a British-Pakistani rapper (played by Riz Ahmed) whose debilitating illness forces him to reckon with his Muslim identity.There’s a reason religion has remained a throughline in each of these projects, including “Your Mother.”“I can’t deny that I’m a product of 9/11,” Tariq said, reflecting on what continues to draw him to religion in his work. “I was 13, 14, when it happened, and then a crosshair was formed on Islam and being Muslim. I had to start answering questions really early about what does faith mean to me. I think for a long time I [saw myself] as a representative of a faith, but I don’t know if I even believed at the time. But I liked the idea of representing or advocating for something. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been trying to unpack my own understanding.”That perspective helps explain how Ali’s Latif came to be in “Your Mother.” The man of faith spends much of the film wrestling with the Muslim beliefs he once held, especially after, as he puts it, God took away the person who had been holding his family together while he devoted himself to work. But without his faith or whole family to anchor him, Latif is forced to confront the contradiction between the man he has become and the man he knows he’s meant to be.“What I find really fascinating about religious people is they kind of pick and choose,” Tariq remarked. “The self-righteous religious people, the ones that I’ve been around, where it’s like, ‘Well, I do it this way,’ and it’s like, wait, how do you justify that?” “I think that’s who Latif is in some ways,” he continued. “Very rigid in his thing because if the rigidity breaks, then the facade that he’s been keeping up will start to crumble, which is why people like Haddy and his daughter [played by Adia] are pushing him in ways that he doesn’t know how to handle. In a way, if his wife was still alive — because his wife probably was the bridge that kept these things apart — he could continue to live this facade.”That internal tension is what ultimately drew Tariq to Ali for the role. After their previous project fell through, he knew Ali had the qualities needed to embody Latif’s rigid exterior while revealing the cracks underneath.“The way he carries grief and dignity at the same time is really… I’ve never seen an actor who can do that and can also kick ass,” said the director. “Because I knew that he could do that. I would see him train. Like, this guy’s an athlete, but not just an athlete. He’s also a deeply sensitive man who knows how to get into the skin of a character, but do it all with an effortlessness and authenticity.”“It wasn’t just because he’s Muslim,” he added. “That was an amazing part of it, of course, but it was the fact that he could bring a gravitas and a dignity that I think was necessary in carrying this, and of course, presence.” Jaclyn MartinezTariq called Ali his “co-pilot” for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”Latif’s greatest challenge in “Your Mother” comes in the form of Cho’s Pastor Hwan, a zealous preacher whose unwavering convictions put Latif’s own faith to the test. Tariq conceived Hwan as a “one-to-one mirror” to Latif, believing the preacher’s fervor would draw something out of the character that makes the film’s miraculous ending all the more extraordinary.“The reason why I wanted someone from a faith community is because of the importance of grace, and miracles that people who believe in the unseen have to believe are happening,” the filmmaker explained. Without giving too much away, audiences will see how those ideas take shape once Cho’s menacing character enters Latif’s world.There will undoubtedly be much more for audiences to unpack once “Your Mother” finally reaches them. But throughout my conversation with Tariq, one idea keeps resurfacing: the deeply religious foundation beneath his compassionate film. From the taped rugs on the floor of the mosque Latif regularly visits, to the Black Muslim community he turns to for support, to the Islamic hadith (a teaching of the Prophet Muhammad) that inspired the film’s title, Tariq has gone to great lengths to make “Your Mother” feel as honest and authentic as possible.The question now is whether audiences are ready to meet such a film on those terms.As Tariq makes clear, “Your Mother” isn’t his attempt to offer the world a model of Muslim representation onscreen, “quell misconceptions” or even speak on behalf of an entire community.“Maybe an earlier version of me was like that,” he said, “but what I’ve learned is that that’s propaganda and sloganeering. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in people and humanity.”That’s ultimately what Tariq hopes audiences take away from “Your Mother.”As for what Tariq wants out of his film, he’s eager to see what it might teach him once it’s out of his hands and in front of the world, particularly among younger viewers seeking something more genuine than the blockbuster movies dominating theaters today.“People are looking for authentic stories,” he said. “They’re looking for things that don’t feel so plastic. They want things to feel real, and it’s exciting, so I’m really hopeful about that. I’m also curious.”“I want to be involved and engaged in conversations because I think that’s something I’ve also found really interesting with Gen Z and younger people,” he concluded. “They want to be in conversation with the creators. They want to know what’s going on. They want to learn, and I want to learn from them.” That’s the director’s curiosity at work once again. “Your Mother” may be his statement piece, but the conversations it may surely spark could inspire whatever comes next from his arsenal. After all, as his film makes clear, sometimes the questions matter just as much as the answers.“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” hits theaters Sept. 25.