Mohsenin, who splits his time between Seattle and the Bay Area while attending grad school for his MFA, said that the key to this is both his collaborators and the people who come out to see his work. He said he’d made films all his life, but it was only after coming to Seattle, when he was attending Seattle Central College, that he began to work more collaboratively at a larger scale with people.

“Seattle is an incredible incubator for a lot of emerging minds and artists like myself,” Mohsenin said, pointing to both organizations like Northwest Film Forum as well as the community of filmmakers around it as being critical to developing new voices. “It being progressive and open-minded allows for so many different types of people to co-exist with one another. Then, it being a smaller city and the art scene being smaller than other, more competitive and saturated and populated markets allows for you to find your people sooner and work together faster.”

Though he only shot what does it feel like to live inside of a pomegranate? recently, he said that this journey of working with other people was closer to seven years of collaborations that brought him to the point of now making bigger films.

“The movie wouldn’t exist without the collective effort of everyone involved,” Mohsenin said. “Money is a big part of things, but I also think you can buy yourself an amazing work of art. You can’t buy it from the ground up, you still have to make it, you still have to put in the work, you still have to have the right people by your side.”

To Mohsenin, his impression of the Seattle scene is that, while it is smaller than somewhere like Los Angeles, this is not always a bad thing, as the most important thing you need to make it is good collaborators. When he was setting out to make films, Mohsenin said that if he didn’t directly know someone he needed to connect with for a specific part of a project, he was always only a couple degrees removed from them. However, he said it can’t become a solely transactional relationship and that it’s important for everyone to lift each other up together.

“You can’t expect people to show up for your stuff if you’re also not going out to show up for other people’s stuff,” Mohsenin said.

Mohsenin said he was always working to put this into practice, not just making his own films, but also other people’s. He said that this was a critical part of his own journey as it allowed him to connect with other creatives, and reflect on how he would want to make his own work when his time came.

“Make other people’s films. Help other people execute their vision, and when you’re on set, when you’re in conversation with these folks, you get to talk about yours,” Mohsenin said. “You can’t just rely on your own projects to develop your skills. You also have to apply them on other people’s projects and endeavors.”

It’s this collaboration, the lifting up of other people, that is critical to both the work itself and the whole experience of making it.

“‘What are you making it for?’ I think you’ve got to ask yourself that question. I think the love of the game is an answer that I’ve given myself often,” Mohsenin said. “In the scenarios where you don’t have much of a budget to work with and you’re making it out of a passion, you have to seek people who align with that vision and also do it for the love of the game.”

It isn’t easy, but when this collective comes together, it can make magic. Mohsenin’s film is this in action. A poetic, nearly wordless work that also speaks volumes as it explores the inside of a pomegranate and a lone figure who discovers it in a snowy Washington field, is not only the best thing that plays that night at Local Sightings (with apologies to the fun horror puppet short), but one of those films that feels like a genuine discovery and makes events like these such gems.

Even as it only runs five minutes, eschewing a conventional narrative to instead capture a feeling, it contains within it, much like the humble pomegranate, something memorably moving the more you cut into it. It’s also a fun, richly detailed movie to watch, with the crunching of the snow under the feet of its central character making you feel as though the cold may be creeping up your toes, just as your mouth waters at the sounds and sight of a pomegranate being split open. At the same time, it takes on a more melancholic tone, grappling with broader questions surrounding connecting to cultural heritage before creating a feeling of claustrophobia once we go into the pomegranate.

It’s a subtle, striking work that also began simply. Mohsenin, who designed the pomegranate himself and utilized unexposed 16mm film, said he first began with an image of a figure walking through the snow and coming across a giant fruit (in this case, the titular pomegranate) before we are then taken inside it. He began to sketch out these surreal images, storyboarding out what he had in mind for how he’d capture it, while also asking himself questions both thematic and technical.

“Why am I even thinking about this?” Mohsenin said, outlining how he began to ponder what it was that drew him to the image and recalling how the eventual title was a question that he just kept coming back to. “It was just the thing that I kept writing at the top of all these things. Whether it was the project statement that I wrote or proposals or storyboards, it was the thing I put at the top of everything.”

Mohsenin said, in the past, he’d usually just make something and then try to understand it himself afterwards. But for this film and since making it, he’s found himself wanting to find answers to the questions he was asking himself. He felt this would help him bring people, both the audience watching the film and those he made it with, along for the leap he was taking.

“When making a sort of experimental, open-ended film like this, you still want collaborators to be on your page and understand your vision and why you’re making something,” Mohsenin said. “If they could see what I was seeing, we were on a great first footing.”