Iman Vellani Stars in Climate Thriller 'Suffering Is Optional' From Cannes Director Zarrar Kahn, Filming in Hamilton and Montreal

One of the most intriguing Canadian co-productions to surface this year is now firmly in pre-production, and it brings together a Cannes-celebrated director, a Marvel star making a pointed pivot to prestige indie cinema, and a genuinely unusual premise that blends Shakespearean adaptation with climate grief. Suffering Is Optional, written and directed by Zarrar Kahn, is eyeing a principal photography start in early 2027 across Hamilton and Montreal, giving crew in both Ontario and Quebec meaningful lead time to get on the radar of the production team now.

Kahn is the central creative force here, and his trajectory is worth understanding. His debut feature In Flames premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes 2023, a remarkable entry point for any filmmaker, and the film went on to become Pakistan's official submission for the Academy Awards. That kind of debut signals a director who works with intention and earns the trust of serious collaborators. With Suffering Is Optional, Kahn is expanding his scope considerably, developing the script from firsthand accounts of climate disaster survivors and threading those real-world stakes into a story that is, on its surface, a campus drama and a ghost story. The logline does a lot of heavy lifting: a 20-year-old drama student starring in a school production of Hamlet is visited by the ghost of her deceased partner, who carries a climate prophecy. It is the kind of concept that sounds audacious until you learn who is in front of and behind the camera, and then it sounds like exactly the right project for exactly the right moment.

Iman Vellani, who broke out as the lead of Marvel Studios' Ms. Marvel on Disney+ and reprised the role in The Marvels, plays Noor Rahman. Her presence is a significant signal about the ambition of this film. Choosing to anchor a Telefilm Canada-backed climate thriller with a young actor best known from the MCU suggests a production that is genuinely trying to reach beyond the traditional arthouse audience. Vellani is Canadian, having grown up in Markham, Ontario, and her casting here feels like a homecoming of sorts, returning to Canadian production infrastructure after a stretch in the American studio system. The producers on this project include Lindsay Blair Goeldner of LBG Films, Anam Abbas, and Julie Groleau of Couronne Nord, with Karen Harnisch and Kaleem Aftab serving as executive producers. Aftab, notably, is a film critic and producer with deep ties to international festival circuits, which reinforces the sense that this project is being positioned for the kind of festival run that Kahn's debut enjoyed.

The production is structured as a multi-company co-production, which is a common and well-worn model in Canadian independent film. CityLights Media, LBG Films, Other Memory Media, and Couronne Nord are all attached as production entities, with financing from Telefilm Canada. Telefilm's involvement is the clearest indicator of the film's scale and credibility within the Canadian system. The federal agency backs projects it considers culturally significant and commercially viable, and the combination of an award-recognized director, a high-profile lead, and a timely subject makes this a textbook Telefilm candidate. The co-production structure, spanning at least Ontario and Quebec companies, likely also positions the film to access provincial tax credits in both jurisdictions, which will shape where and how production resources are allocated across the two locations.

Hamilton and Montreal are the confirmed shooting locations, and both make considerable sense for this project. Hamilton has become one of Ontario's most active production cities, bolstered by its proximity to Toronto (roughly an hour's drive), its diverse and adaptable architectural landscape, and strong provincial tax incentives through the Ontario Production Services Tax Credit and the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit. The city has a solid local crew base drawn from the broader Toronto-Hamilton corridor, and productions shooting there frequently tap into the same talent pipeline that supports Toronto's busy studio ecosystem. Montreal, meanwhile, brings its own infrastructure advantages, including a deep French-language and bilingual crew base, competitive Quebec tax credits through SODEC and the Quebec Film and Television Tax Credit, and a thriving production community that regularly hosts both English and French-language projects. The dual-city structure of this shoot means crew should be prepared for the possibility of split schedules or location-specific hiring pools, and those based in either city would be wise to flag their availability early.

For crew assessing this opportunity, the production's genre and thematic ambitions offer useful signals about departmental needs. A climate thriller with a theatrical-within-a-film structure (the Hamlet production nested inside the main narrative) implies a strong art department workload, handling both the contemporary campus environments and the heightened, possibly stylized staging of the play-within-a-film. The ghost story element and climate imagery suggest VFX work, though the scale of that pipeline will depend on how Kahn approaches the supernatural and apocalyptic elements visually. Given his Cannes background and the Telefilm framework, this is almost certainly a union production operating under IATSE and ACTRA agreements. Department heads in Hamilton and Montreal should be following this one closely as 2026 approaches and the hiring cycle begins in earnest.

With principal photography not expected until early 2027, there is genuine runway here, but that runway moves faster than it looks. Productions at this stage are typically building out their key department head roster throughout the preceding year, and in a co-production model spanning two provinces, the coordination work begins well before cameras roll. The full production listing for Suffering Is Optional is available now on ProductionList.com, where readers can find confirmed crew contacts, production company details, and location information. Set up an alert for this one and revisit the listing regularly as the production moves through pre-production and the hiring pipeline opens up.

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