Fifteen years into an asylum case that never moves, Leyla can fly to her sister's wedding, or she can keep her life in America. She cannot do both.
Synopsis
Leyla left Iran at twenty with a pinky promise to her little sister, Sara, that she'd come back after she finished school. Fifteen years later, Sara is getting married in Turkey, and Leyla desperately wants to go, but her asylum case still has no updates. On the surface, she's built a life that looks fine: a tasteful L.A. apartment, a job ghostwriting joy for other people's Instagram captions, a laugh that shows up right on cue. Underneath, she is quietly falling apart, caught between two worlds that neither one fully claims her.
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About the project
Almost Home is inspired by true events, the waiting that friends and family around the world have lived through and rarely talk about out loud. The call to a mother that ends with "when it's ready, it's ready." A brother's wedding attended through a screen. A family's whole life arriving in nine-second increments. The skill of holding enormous joy and enormous grief in the same hand, on the same afternoon, and telling no one.
Different countries, different systems, the same shape of life. What stayed with me was how little of it ever gets said out loud, and how ordinary the waiting looks from the outside.
Millions of people are living in U.S. immigration limbo right now, and millions more are waiting somewhere else, in some other queue. Their stories usually reach the screen as statistics, or as headlines, or not at all. I wanted to tell one up close, in the two languages I grew up between.
The filmmakers
Hedyeh Falsafi
Writer, Director, Producer
Hedyeh Falsafi was born and raised in Iran and moved to California at sixteen. She began in architecture before changing course to a B.A. in Drama at San Francisco State University, which started her career in film and theatre. Her international background shapes how she works: she is drawn to stories that live between languages and between places. She works as an actress, producer and director across features, television, commercials and independent productions. Her acting credits include NCIS (CBS) and For All Mankind (Apple TV+), and she received a Best Supporting Actress award for the feature film Wake Up Sleeping Beauty. Having spent years on both sides of the camera, she directs with a performer's understanding of what she is asking for.
Website: hedyehfalsafi.com
IMDB: Hedyeh Falsafi
Morteza Gheidi
Producer
Morteza Gheidi is a producer and award-winning Director of Photography. He has produced and shot two short films that played more than 30 international festivals and won multiple awards, and his career spans over 20 features, 200 commercials, and 90 short films and documentaries, including work alongside Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on Mohammad: The Messenger of God. His cinematography has been honored at the Manaki Brothers Film Festival, and a feature he worked on was recognized at Cannes.
IMDB: Morteza Gheidi
Jasmin Please
Producer
Jasmin Haugstuen is a producer, director and actress based in Los Angeles, and co-founder of Fake ID Productions. She earned a BA in Acting from Rose Bruford College in the UK and has since worked across three continents from an assistant directing internship at Honolulu Theatre for Youth to studying comedy and improv at The Groundlings and UCB.
She co-founded and ran Honolulu's three-day New Play Festival and has worked in production at Paramount Studios. Her onscreen credits include a speaking role in the comedy feature Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates; her directing credits include the pilot Questroom and the short film Lucky Alien.
Through Fake ID, Jasmin produces film, theatre, and immersive experiences and she also helps run Script Shuffle, Fake ID's monthly live reading series, and serves as Producer and Creative Director of Shufflefest.
Azadeh Ghochagh is a director and screenwriter with a master's degree in cinema from Tehran, Iran. Over a twenty-year career as an assistant director on features and series, she has also been directing her own films throughout, including the shorts Sormeh, With Me, Men on the Bridge, Morning Sun, and Fever, and the television films Only Top Student, The Victim, and Penetrating. Her work has played more than fifty international festivals, among them Cinequest, the San Francisco Film Festival, Gijón, Izmir, Moondance, and POWFest, and has earned awards for directing, costume design, and Best Film.
IMDB: Azadeh Ghochagh
Mathew Young
Cinematographer
Maty Young is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles and the founder of Young One Studio. He started out at twelve in Perth, Western Australia, as an actor and musician, trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and founded Young One Studio in Melbourne in 2014. He moved to Los Angeles in 2018 and turned his focus to film.
Since, his work has appeared on Apple TV and HBO Max. He has worked as cinematographer, director, or both on forty+ films, alongside over a hundred cinematic scenes he wrote, directed and photographed.
Website: https://www.youngonestudio.com/
IMDB: Mathew Young
Benyamin Ghochagh
Head Editor
Benyamin Ghochagh is an editor and post-production artist who has been working in film and television since 1999. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Dramatic Literature and is a graduate of Tehran Film School, where he studied Cinema Directing. His editing credits span television series, feature and short films, music videos, and commercials. He has also collaborated on numerous productions in color grading, sound design, and visual effects. In recent years, he has expanded his work into producing, working on several projects, including three productions in the United States and Germany.
IMDB: Benyamin Ghochagh
Help make Almost Home
Every gift goes to this project through Cinematography for Actors Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
