Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi 
Portrait by Mohsen Shahmardi

MG Tell us a little about your background, and how you started your career. Did you study film?

AA No. I come from Ahwaz, in the south of Iran, and as you might know, football is huge there. I wanted to be a professional footballer, and I signed up to a pretty good club. Then, at age 20, I had a career-ending knee injury. I had a friend who worked on the production side of film and TV, and I started working with him, learning bit by bit about the process of filmmaking. I kept a small notebook in which I recorded what I learnt, and later, my ideas. I got a chance to work on the set of a TV series directed by Kianoush Ayari, who happens to be from my hometown, and he gave me a break as an assistant director. You could say that working for him was my education in cinema.

MG Tell me the story of Inside Amir. How did it come into being?

AA The spark of the idea is the fact that everyone around me is always talking about leaving, as well as my sister Elnaz to whom the film is dedicated. She’s the youngest of us seven siblings, and we have always had a very strong bond. She emigrated to the US nine or ten years ago, and when she was about to leave, she asked me to take her around Tehran for a week and hang out together, meet all my friends and basically create memories. A few days before she left, she was very emotional and full of doubt. I remember her sitting in the house of my friend Nader – where much of Inside Amir was shot – saying the same lines that, later, I gave to the character of Amir. Yet at that point, I didn’t do anything about it and worked instead on my second feature film project, Two Dogs (2021). About a year ago, I had a video call with Elnaz, who is living in the US. I asked her how she was doing, and her response really shook me. She said, “I don’t have any problems, and I am happy – but still, I have the question in my mind, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t have any reason to be here.’”

MG Tell me about your cast of characters, who are played by a mixture of professional and first-time actors. Was there a logic to their casting?

AA I put together a script that featured some real events and locations, people and places I know already, and then I introduced fictional characters and events. My method is to make films using ingredients and elements that I know and build from there. So, some characters are my friends in real life and others are professional actors. The role of Tara is played by Hadis Nazeri, a very well-known actress in Iran. I wanted the sort of person who would be least likely to ask someone for a date in a supermarket, and Hadis has such an innocent, shy persona, I thought she would be perfect – and surprising. Nariman Farrokhi, who plays the part of the deaf character, is a very good painter and has never been in front of the camera. The main character Amir is played by Amirhossein Hosseini, a brilliant actor who has some experience onscreen, but not as a protagonist. I felt he was able to portray Amir’s inner life with the depth of feeling that I was looking for. The film was totally scripted, so every line was entirely written. There were no improvisations.

MG Of course, one of the key characters in the film is Tehran itself. I’m sure you’re asked about that a lot.

AA Not as much as you think. You’re right, Tehran is one of the main characters in the film, in all its peculiarities. It has such a specific kind of beauty – the sight of a certain street after the rain, the view as you turn a corner. Amir loves cycling in real life and, as such, fits the character so well. When you traverse the city on a bike, you tend to go over certain routes over and over, and this repetitious cycling through memories and meaningful locations is fascinating, and shows the beauty and grace of Tehran. Amir is wistful, because as he contemplates leaving the city, he has a dawning realisation of what he is about to leave behind. One of the joys of taking the film on the international festival circuit is having people be really surprised by Tehran’s beauty and charm. It’s been a cliche of Iranian cinema that all films shot in Tehran tend to be in the poorer southern part of the city, in order to display a performative sort of grittiness and authenticity. I wanted to show that this is Tehran, too.

MG Tell me about the process of filmmaking. You didn’t have official permission from the Ministry of Culture, did you?

AA No. I had decided after my first big-budget film, back when I was 28, that I didn’t want to repeat that experience. The restrictions imposed on that film were not compromises I wanted to make – so I have set out on the path of making films as an independent filmmaker, and finding ways of working outside the system. You can get permission to shoot without actually getting an official license to make a film. This sort of permit doesn’t involve script supervision and scrutiny. That makes me a less official and professional director, but I am happy with that status as long as my spirit is satisfied.

MG The only thing I regret is that Iranian audiences won’t get the opportunity to see a film that would resonate so strongly.

AA You’re right, and that’s a real shame, but what has been happening here recently is small-scale screenings with film club members and students. Of course, I am hopeful of finding international audiences too. I want to tell you about two experiences I have had after public showings of Inside Amir. One was in Naples, Italy, when a young Iranian woman in her twenties came on stage to tell me how she had left Iran some 20 years earlier and that for once someone had made a film about her experience of loss and she was so emotional. What was even more surprising to me was a young Italian woman who came up on the stage to say that she had been pressuring her parents to allow her to leave Naples, looking for a better life elsewhere. Seeing the film, she said that she now wanted to reconsider her decision. An identical thing happened in Oslo, in Norway, when another young woman told me that she had been asking her parents to let her leave for the US, and the film had helped her decide to stay. She showed me her message to her dad, apologising for putting a lot of pressure on them. She had written, “OK, I’m not going to the US – instead, I want a bike.”

MG So, it’s not just an Iranian problem. 

AA Exactly. The thing I’m only gradually realising is that I’m telling a universal story. That’s what’s special. .