‘The Betrayers’ Director Talks Navigating Political, Personal Treachery in Crimea-Set Thriller

The Betrayers is a tense, two-handed thriller set in present-day Crimea that plunges two Soviet-era Jews — a disgraced Israeli politician and a disgraced 1980s KGB informer — into an interconnected matrix of personal and political betrayal.

The deception and double-crossing goes deep in the third feature from director David Bezmozgis set for a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and a movie he adapted from his 2014 novel of the same. “I chose to write this as a novel first, but I always believed, even at the time, that it’s something I would want to bring to the screen,” the Canadian director tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The centerpiece confrontation behind The Betrayers comes between Baruch Kotler, the politician played by Michael Aronov, who betrays his wife and daughter when his affair with his mistress, Leora, played by Kaelen Ohm, is exposed. With his political career in tatters and his wife and daughter devastated by grief over his affair, he and Leora choose a shameful exile in Yalta.

But it’s not long before Kotler has a street encounter with Chaim Tankilevitch (Simon McBurney), a former friend whose betrayal sent him to the Gulag before he landed on his feet in Israeli politics. The simmering tension between Kotler and Tankilevitch help Bezmozgis patiently delay their showdown until, after taking time to instill tension and suspense, two opposing forces collide in a hail of fiery accusations and fisticuffs.  

“A lot of the film is building towards this confrontation,” Bezmozgis explains. “If Kotler doesn’t see Tankilevitch while they’re in Yalta, there is no movie. So all of the story strands have to do with the politics of the time, and relate back to their past, and are made sense of by what happens to them when they meet in the present.”

And there’s no The Betrayers the movie without the original novel of the same name that Bezmozgis published in 2014, just before Russia invaded Ukraine. In all, completing his book-to-screen adaptation took over ten years. 

“I think the reason I stuck with it for over a decade is I thought the subject matter remained relevant,” Bezmozgis adds. The screenplay for The Betrayers needed updates due to Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia and another for Israel’s invasion of Gaza since Oct. 2023. But, politics aside, Bezmozgis set about to study in the best cinematic way possible how personal betrayals can be weaponized by political ideologies.

“It’s layers upon layers of betrayal, personal and political, I hope woven in such a way it’s organic, that none of it feels like it’s superficially put on,” the director says. The Betrayers, while set in Ukraine and Israel, was mostly shot in Bari, Italy, and was ably shepherded to camera by Canadian producer Bill Marks and Ukrainian producers Volodymyr Yatsenko and Anna Yatsenko (who will also be in Toronto with another world premiere, Black Sunflowers, by American director James Marcus Haney).

The Canada-Ukraine co-production, also starring Kaelen Ohm and Roxanna Hope Radja, marks the first world premiere at TIFF for Bezmozgis, who directed the films Victoria Day and Natasha and co-wrote the screenplay for Charlotte.

“I’ve never had a film as a director at TIFF. I live in this city,” the director says ahead of the Sept. 12 premiere at the ScotiaBank Theatre.