From Tehran To Pune: An Interview With Filmmaker Sina Ahmadkhani

It is a crisp festival morning in Pune, where the city’s long relationship with cinema—archives, institutes, and cine clubs—meets the buzz of a contemporary international short film festival. Into this environment steps Iranian filmmaker Sina Ahmadkhani, whose Watch With The Weary Ones (2025) has just been officially selected by the Pune Short Film Festival, one of the most consistently well‑reviewed festivals on the global submission circuit. That selection is the immediate reason for this interview, but it sits atop a formidable record: his earlier feature Tell the Wind Too has won Best International Experimental Feature in Ecuador, Best Experimental Feature in Argentina, and Best Feature Film at an Indian‑organised festival in Mumbai, alongside a major popularity award for its lead in Asia. Taken together, Pune becomes less a debut and more a new chapter in an already established international career.

Q: Sina, congratulations on your Pune Short Film Festival selection. Let’s start there: what does it mean for you that Watch With The Weary Ones is screening in a city like Pune, with its deep cinematic heritage and this festival’s strong reputation among global filmmakers?

A: Pune feels distinct. This is a city where cinema is part of the cultural DNA, with film schools, archives, and a seriously engaged cinephile community. The festival itself is trusted by independent filmmakers globally, and that matters to me. To have Watch With The Weary Ones enter that environment feels less like another stop on a circuit and more like an invitation into a long, thoughtful conversation about what cinema can be.

Q: Pune Short Film Festival is known for balancing international selections with a strong commitment to Marathi and Indian cinema. How do you see your film fitting into that blend of global and local voices?

A: The festival's balance between global and local voices is exactly the kind of context my film needs. It's a quiet, experimental work, not one that announces itself loudly, but it carries concerns that I think resonate across both registers: the texture of everyday gestures, the weight of small emotional moments, the question of what home means when you're somewhere unfamiliar. I don't see the film as something exotic placed beside Indian cinema. I see it as a different dialect of the same conversation, where Pune, with its layered cultural identity, feels particularly well-suited to host.

Q: Indian readers may first be hearing your name through Pune, but you arrive here with a remarkable festival history. Tell the Wind Too has won Best International Experimental Feature in Ecuador and Best Experimental Feature in Argentina. When those Latin American awards came in, what did they signal to you about the film’s place in world cinema?

A: Those awards confirmed something I had hoped for but wasn't sure I could achieve: that a film so rooted in personal experience could still be fully legible, emotionally and formally, to audiences with completely different frames of reference. That was the central challenge during production, and in many ways the hardest one.

Latin America has a serious and demanding experimental film culture, shaped by decades of political and poetic cinema. Ecuador and Argentina aren't easy rooms. The fact that the film's rhythm, its silences, its relationship to landscape landed with juries steeped in that tradition told me that its language had traveled, that Tell the Wind Too had found a real place in the conversation around global experimental cinema, not just as a curiosity, but as a genuine participant.

Q: Then came India, before Pune: Tell the Wind Too was awarded Best Feature Film at an international festival curated from Mumbai, judged by figures linked closely to India’s independent film ecosystem. How did that Indian jury recognition differ from the Latin American experimental prizes in your mind?

A: The Indian recognition felt different because it came from a context where cinema has to be balanced between art and industry. The jury in Mumbai is close to both independent filmmakers and broader distribution realities, so their decision told me that the film was not only respected for its formal innovation but also accepted as a complete feature capable of engaging audiences. It was my first real sign that my work could belong inside Indian conversations about cinema, and that meant a great deal to me.

Q: Alongside jury prizes, Tell the Wind Too also earned a major popularity award in Asia for its lead performance. How important is it to you that your films connect with general audiences as well as festival juries?

A: It is crucial. Jury awards are wonderful because they come from people who think critically about cinema, but I never want my films to be exercises that only specialists can appreciate. The popularity award told me that audiences were emotionally invested in the characters, that they recognized something of themselves on screen. For me, the ideal situation is when a film can be challenging formally and still offer a strong emotional entry point for viewers.

Q: When you bring Watch With The Weary Ones to Pune now, do you feel you are introducing a “new” work to India, or continuing a relationship that started with that earlier Mumbai win?

A: It feels like a continuation. The Mumbai award was the first step in an ongoing dialogue with Indian audiences and curators. Pune builds on that by placing a new film into a different part of India’s cinematic ecosystem, where it is deeply connected to film education and preservation. So, I do not feel that I am arriving in a completely new territory. I feel that I am returning to a place that has already shown generosity to my work, but with something new to offer.

Q: Outside the festival circuit, your films have also entered institutional art spaces. Your newer work Watch With The Weary Ones has been screened as part of an exhibition at the Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum, a key hub for contemporary image culture in the Caucasus. How does that museum context influence how you think about what you are bringing to Pune?

A: Being shown at the Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum alongside photographers and filmmakers whose work I genuinely admire was something I didn't take lightly. There's a particular kind of recognition that comes not from a prize but from context, from being placed in a room where the conversation is already happening at a high level, and being considered a part of it. That meant a great deal to me.

Cinema can sometimes feel isolated from the broader world of image-making, and that museum space collapsed that distance. To have my film exist alongside still photography and video work, treated as part of the same inquiry into what images can do and say, that's the kind of company I hope my work deserves, and I remain genuinely grateful for it.

I bring that responsibility to Pune. The festival setting is different, but the question it raises for me is the same: can each moment in the film hold its own weight? Can the images linger beyond the screening, the way a photograph stays with you after you leave a gallery? I hope Watch with the Weary Ones can offer that — not just an experience that unfolds in time, but one that leaves something behind.

Q: Your filmography also includes a newer short, Sunlight, Veiled, which has been recognized in North American independent circuits, and commercial documentary show Parvaz. How do these diverse projects feed into the film that Pune audiences will see?

A: Each project teaches me something different. Sunlight, Veiledsharpened my sense of structure within the independent format. The documentary series trained my eye for texture and movement in real spaces. Together, those lessons feed into Watch With The Weary Ones, which is perhaps my most distilled attempt so far to balance experimentation with accessibility.

Q: Standing here in Pune, with a fresh selection at a respected Indian festival and a list of major international wins behind you, do you still see yourself as emerging, or as an established filmmaker building a second phase of your career?

A: I feel more like I am entering that second phase. The early years were about proving that I could make films that mattered beyond my immediate circle. The awards in Ecuador, Argentina, Mumbai, and the popularity recognition in Asia gave me a foundation. Now, with Pune and the museum screenings, I feel that the work is maturing in dialogue with different cultures. I am not chasing validation in the same way; I am more focused on deepening the conversation.

Q: Finally, for Indian readers discovering you because of Pune: what do you hope they carry with them after watching Watch With The Weary Ones at this festival?

A: More than anything, I hope they leave with a feeling rather than a clear message. The film explores loss, and a longing for the unknown other — that quiet ache you get when you let your life slip by without truly seeing it. Underneath that, there's something I deeply wanted to reach: an awareness of the blessings hidden in the everyday.

We move through our own cities and routines almost blindly. But in a different reality, everything we experience could become the only thing we long for. Memory is a mysterious thing, and fulfillment doesn't always live where our pragmatic minds expect it to. Sometimes the smallest gesture is enough to change the texture of a day.

If that feeling comes across in Pune, I'll feel the selection has fulfilled its purpose.