Interview with Writer Director Tomer Almagor for Psychological Horror Thriller "KLIFHAUS" (2026)

After the 2025 Bahamas International Film Festival (BIFF), I interviewed writer-director Tomer Almagor. We spoke at length about his illustrious career as an independent filmmaker, and his latest film psychological horror "Klifhaus" (2026). His film10 Kilos of Cocaine screened at BIFF. The film was directed by Doron Eran and inspired by the bestselling true story by Sharon Yitzhaki.

You are a writer, director and producer. Is there a role you like the most?

TOMER: I don’t separate the roles emotionally because they all come from the same impulse to shape a story from the inside out, and they all fall under the daily life of being a filmmaker. Writing is where everything begins, where I can explore obsession, intimacy, fear, and moral uncertainty without limits. It is the place where I can be my most personal and spend time with my demons, in the best and worst ways. 

Directing is where those inner worlds become physical through performance, space, rhythm, and silence. I love working with a team of collaborators, and that journey that was once just me while writing suddenly becomes everyone’s to take part in. It is exhausting and exhilarating in the same breath. Unlike writing, where I can take my time, directing requires precision because the clock is always ticking. Every choice has weight, and every decision affects the whole.

Producing is the discipline that makes the vision real and protects it through practical challenges. I had to teach myself to produce, and I am grateful for that skill because it allows me to protect the vision but also be fiscally responsible. It helps partners feel confident in my ability to deliver in this risky balance of art and commerce.

Editing is where the film finally reveals itself. I edit my own work because it keeps me close to the emotional currents that inspired the story in the first place. I began my professional filmmaking journey as an editor, and it will always be my safe space. If I had to choose one role, directing is where I feel most alive because it is the moment when all the pieces collide. But moving fluidly between writing, directing, producing, and editing allows me to protect the emotional core of the film and make sure that every choice truly serves the story.

How difficult is it to be an independent filmmaker today? Does it require wearing many hats?

TOMER: Being an independent filmmaker today is both harder than ever and strangely more possible than ever. The landscape is crowded, financing is unpredictable, distribution is fragmented, and attention spans are under constant assault. You have to fight to make something meaningful and then fight again to get it seen. It absolutely requires wearing many hats. For most indie films there is no cavalry coming, so you become your own cavalry in every phase. You develop the script, build the budget, assemble the team, secure financing, chase locations, negotiate deals, work through union paperwork, and once you finish the film you still have to strategize festivals, marketing, and release. Each step demands a different muscle.

For me the hardest phases are the beginning and the end. The birth of an idea, finding the next project, is always terrifying and magical. You’re lost. Not that you aren’t lost during every phase of filmmaking, but when a project ends there is always this void inside me that I have to fill. You realize you have to start again from nothing, and it takes time to decide where to put your energy. It can be scary but also exciting because ideas come from everything. I’m in constant inner and external dialogues simultaneously and I almost need that to survive. But returning to ground zero after a monumental effort is always tough.

Then there is the other end: sending your movie into the world. Distribution is a wild word right now. It comes in all shapes and forms, and finding your audience can be a dream or a nightmare. Sometimes people embrace the film immediately. Other times, even when you feel deeply connected to the work, no one seems to see it at first. And because everything today is so politicized, that can throw another wrench into the wheels for a film trying to find its place. It is a constant conflict for someone like me who thrives in inner chaos, positive anarchy, and a kind of tuned-in nihilism, always attuned to nuance and fact. But the challenge is also the reward. If you are willing to stretch yourself, stay resilient, and stay curious, the process becomes incredibly empowering. The more hats I wear, the more control I have over the tone, the emotion, and the integrity of the final film. It is tough, but it is also the reason I love independent filmmaking. It forces you to be resourceful, creative, and relentlessly honest about what you want to say.

Was there a film you saw that made you want to be a filmmaker? And out of all your projects to date, do you have a favorite project you have worked on that you are most proud of?

TOMER: I never had a single film that made me want to become a filmmaker. I’m experiential by nature and I get bored fast, and once I finished getting into trouble growing up, moving into the creative world felt like the only obvious transition to keep me safe, or at least safe enough. It gave all that restless energy somewhere to go. Before I even discovered cinema, I grew up reading constantly. I inherited that from my mother. As a kid I would devour four or five books a week, mostly pulp Westerns, Tarzan novels, comics, anything I could get my hands on. Music was another huge part of my early world, and discovering punk especially helped me calm down my inner chaos and gave me a sense of identity and direction. All of that shaped my imagination long before I knew I wanted to create stories. As I grew older my tastes evolved, I started writing poetry and short stories, and somewhere along the way that internal world of words slowly transitioned into a world of images. That was when cinema took over.

When I fell into film, I immersed myself in many different cinematic worlds at once, European art house, Egyptian melodramas, American new wave cinema. I’m a cinephile by nature and I still try to watch at least one film a day. I keep personal lists and obsessions, but I can’t point to one defining influence. Early on I was struck by Kubrick, especially A Clockwork Orange for its formal precision and moral discomfort. 

Pasolini’s Accattone affected me deeply with its rawness and spiritual despair. Films like Sweet Sixteen shaped my sense of emotional realism. And the great American filmmakers taught me about character, tension, and restraint. My influences come from everywhere. Different cinemas, different cultures, different emotional registers. That mix lives inside my work whether I’m conscious of it or not. As for my own films, choosing a favorite is impossible. It’s like being asked to pick a favorite child. Each project reflects a different period moment in my life. 9 Full Moons represents a period of purity and love against all odds. King of Beasts is a cause film about my love for animals, but it was also like traveling into my own heart of darkness, almost a personal Tarzan adventure deep in the African bush, confronting fear and moral complexity. And right now, I’m living in a space of existential dread, caught between the personal and the global, and that tension gave birth to Klifhaus. It’s a film born from instability, intimacy, and a kind of haunted psychological landscape.

They are all different because I am different when I make them. I’m deeply infatuated with whatever I’m working on in the moment, and already in love with whatever comes next. And I feel myself slowly circling back toward a sense of purity again in future projects. That constant movement between darkness and innocence is what keeps me alive creatively.

Your latest film, Klifhaus, is still in the works. Can you tell us about it? 

TOMER: Klifhaus is a film better felt than explained. It draws from the psychological and supernatural horror of the early seventies, drifting into surreal, psychedelic existential dread. At its core it follows a deeply dysfunctional family, but the film is more interested in what slips out of reach. An American family detours to a crumbling Stalin-era estate deep in rural Georgia. Inside, time loosens. History breathes. The house remembers. And slowly, the woman at the center begins to disappear into it. That’s all it wants you to know.

What inspired you to tell this story? Is it inspired by real events?

TOMER: Klifhaus began with a question that haunted me: what if the real horror is not the house, but the person you share it with? For me the true monster in the film is emotional neglect. The house becomes a trap, a mirror, a pressure chamber. It is a slow-burn descent into madness, a marriage eroded by silence, control, repression, and unmet need. The supernatural is simply the echo of everything that has gone unsaid.

The inspiration is personal in ways I prefer to leave between the lines, but like much of my work it draws from lived experience, emotional truth filtered through a heightened and surreal lens. At the same time the film is rooted in very real history. The legacy of Stalin, his marriage to Nadya, and the many houses and estates scattered across Georgia all left an imprint. That history carries its own ghosts, political and psychological, and the film plays with those nuances because it is about real people with real feelings. If it feels like political commentary, it can be. If it feels like a personal nightmare, it can be. I am drawn to stories that let both be true at once.

How did you go about producing this film? From financing to casting to directing? How long has it taken you from start to near finish? 

TOMER: I did not produce Klifhaus. I wrote, directed, and edited the film. The producer is Doron Eran, a prolific filmmaker in his own right and my creative partner on my last three projects. I produced the last film he directed, Stay Forte, and he produced this one. We have developed a system that allows us to take a film from conception to completion very efficiently. Klifhaus was conceived in early 2025 and is already entering the market. We see eye to eye on the fundamentals of filmmaking, and that trust is one of the most important ingredients for moving forward fluidly and fully immersing yourself in the creative process. It allows you to stay true to the original idea without compromise.

Another key creative partner on this film is Gabrielle Smith Almagor. She has been involved in all my films and she is always the first to read my screenplays and the first to watch a draft of the cut. She is a master storyteller, a great producer, and a gifted casting director, and I trust her taste and insights completely. Her casting instincts are extraordinary. From Nick Stahl to Ana Ularu to Rade Sherbedgia, and newcomers like Josephine Jewers who is a force of nature, her vision was essential. When the casting is right, you already have most of your film alive in front of you.

I also worked once again with my director of photography and frequent collaborator Robert Murphy. We have made four feature films together, and while our process is filled with chaos and spontaneity and is often hard to describe, it is grounded in a deep shared love of cinema. Sometimes we communicate through long conversations, and other times in complete silence. Either way, that understanding finds its way onto the screen.

The final piece was the decision to shoot in and around Tbilisi in Eastern Europe. The location infused my writing with texture and unease, and the authenticity of the place shaped the filmmaking process in ways I could never have recreated elsewhere.

Do you have any anecdotes from the production of the film that make you laugh or that were difficult? 

TOMER: This was a very hard project to pull off, especially with the fast turnaround and the pressure-filled deadlines we set for ourselves, but our Georgian and American crew was incredible. There are plenty of stories, from shooting in real haunted mansions and locations that were all rumored to be ghost ridden, to me and my DP getting stuck on a plane and then stranded in a Newark hotel for four days on our way to Georgia, losing precious prep time. Add to that a parade of scheduling conflicts, endless night shoots that bled into noon the next day, and the general madness of making an ambitious film at high speed.

What kept me laughing was the simple realization that life and set life happen while you are busy making plans. All you can do is adjust, stay flexible, and shift your mindset instantly when the universe throws something new at you. And then there is Rade. He is a brilliant dramatic actor with decades of experience, but I also think he is hilarious, both as an actor and as a person, even though you sometimes cannot tell because he stays completely serious. I let actors’ riff on their lines, and during one very long night shoot I could sense he had reached his limit. His character usually speaks Georgian and occasionally English in a broken accent, and in that scene, he gets to finish off the bad guy with his rifle. Out of nowhere he mutters, perfectly deadpan, “son of a bitch.” I had no idea if he was talking to me, to the scene, or to the universe. But it is in the movie, and it has become one of my favorite moments.

You recently attended BIFF. How was that experience? 

TOMER: I love BIFF. I have been there before in 2015 with my film 9 Full Moons, and it has stayed with me ever since. I think Leslie, the festival director and organizer, along with technical support from people like Karim Duran, does an amazing job. This year we came with 10 Kilos, directed by Doron Eran and inspired by the bestselling true story by Sharon Yitzhaki. Sharon traveled to Bolivia with a young man she barely knew, was framed and accused of smuggling ten kilos of cocaine across the border, and was thrown into one of the most brutal women’s prisons in the country. News stations made her a national figure overnight. Inside the prison she became involved with the head of the Bolivian drug cartel housed in the adjacent men’s facility, adopted a seven-year-old orphan girl, and formed a bond with a beautiful transgender woman. She fell into addiction and then fought her way out of it so she could care for the people she considered her family. Her escape came through a loophole connected to the Pope’s declaration of a Holy Year of Mercy, and she fled with her family to New York before her twenty-sixth birthday. And every part of that is true.

Why is it so important to attend indie boutique festivals like BIFF? 

TOMER: What I love about BIFF and other similar indie festivals is that it remains an intimate festival with strong curatorial taste. They bring in incredible filmmakers, many of whom turn into lifelong friends. This year I had the chance to watch some great films, notably Keep Quiet by Vincent Grashaw, Nobody Wants to Be Here, Nobody Wants to Leave by Cash Robinson, and The Dutchmen by Andre Gains. And one of my absolute favorites, and one of the funniest films I have seen in a long time, was a short from Scandinavia called Snipped Gains. It was a reminder of why festivals like BIFF matter. They create a genuine space to meet filmmakers and watch films that stay with you.

What will you be working on next? 

TOMER: I am working on a number of projects right now, both producing and directing. There are two feature films I am especially excited about. One is a crime thriller I wrote and will direct called Revolvers, a tense, character-driven story set in a morally fractured world. The other is a very different film, a love story called Nowhere in the World. It follows two people trying to hold onto each other against all odds in an extremely polarized, anti-immigration climate. Both films deal with pressure, identity, and survival, but in completely different emotional registers. I cannot wait to bring them to life.

ABOUT TOMER ALMAGOR: 

Interview by Vanessa McMahon