As his graduation film Ahmed made Tanju Miah, a National Lottery-funded short which won Best Factual Film at the Royal Television Society Student Television Awards2007, Best Cinematography at the Kodak Student Commercial Awards 2006 as well as being runner-up in the best newcomer category at the Grierson Awards 2006, TCM classic shorts, Satyajit Rayaward, amongst others. The film appeared at the Sundance Film Festivaland Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2007, Ahmed later directed a western called The Last Thakur. It was a Channel 4 co-production with Artificial Eye as the distributor. The film was received well by critics and Sight & Soundmagazine named The Last Thakur “one of the most confident British debut features since Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior (2001)… with which it shares an Asian location and language and a welcome belief in the primacy of visual storytelling.”
The film premiered at the London Film Festivaland was shown at the Dubai International Film Festival, Mumbai International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and others and finally had its theatrical release in the United Kingdom on 29 June 2009.
Since being nominated for a Cinematography Fellowship Award he has since then signed into his second feature film, The King of Mirpur, which is an urban cop thriller set in the modern subcontinent.