After the U.S. began its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001, Amirani went to that country and interviewed ordinary Afghans at a Taliban-run refugee camp.

They were oppressed by the Taliban, before that they were invaded by the Russians, they've gone through years of war and now they are being bombed by the Americans.”[2][5][6] Amirani has explained that since he was not in Iran during the 1979 revolution, he “always felt I had missed the first-hand experience of an important chapter in my country’s history.

It was time to stop watching the stream of stereotype and customary clichés from the outside, and go find out for myself.” In 2004 he went to Iran “to look for stories” and saw a copy of Shargh, a reformist newspaper.

[7] He ended up writing, producing, directing, and photographing a 2004 documentary, Red Lines and Deadlines, about the staff of the newspaper and its reformist politics.

The Wall Street Journal described the film as “an unprecedented look into the Orwellian world of Iranian journalism.”[5] He wrote, produced, directed, and photographed the documentary Coup 53, which was released in 2019.

[1] The film recounts Operation Ajax, the 1953 coup in Iran engineered by the CIA and MI6 to overthrow the Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.