Kalki Koechlin’s loss is Shriya Pilgaonkar’s gain

Indian cinema has a long tradition of discovering new storytellers in unexpected places, and one recent voice that has attracted quiet, steady attention is Samir Zaidi. His debut short film Two Sinners has been travelling across international festivals, earning strong praise for its emotional depth and moral complexity. But what makes Zaidi’s trajectory especially compelling is how organically it has unfolded — grounded not in film school training, but in lived observation, patient apprenticeships and a deep belief in the poetry of everyday life.

Zaidi’s relationship with creativity began well before he ever stepped onto a set. “As a child, I was fascinated by small, fleeting things — the way people spoke, the silences between arguments, the patterns of light on the walls,” he reflects. He didn’t yet have the vocabulary for what he was absorbing, but the instinct was already in place. At 13, he turned to poetry, sensing that the act of shaping emotions into words offered a kind of clarity he couldn’t find elsewhere. “I realised creativity wasn’t something external I had to chase; it was a way of processing the world,” he says. “Whether it was writing or filmmaking, it came from the same impulse: to make sense of what I didn’t fully understand.”