ALMOST HOME
Short Film
Project Type: Short Film
Project Status: Pre-Production
Writer/Director: Hedyeh Falsafi
Producer: Jasmin Haugstuen Please
Cinematographer: Mathew Young
Production Company: Young One Studio
LOGLINE
She spent fifteen years fighting to belong. The day she finally did, her family became the enemy.
SYNOPSIS
Leyla left Iran at twenty with a pinky promise to her little sister, Sara: she would come back after she finished university. Fifteen years later, Sara is getting married in Turkey, and Leyla desperately wants to go, but her asylum case has no updates. She performs fine for everyone around her. She ghostwrites joy for influencers, keeps a tasteful apartment, makes everyone at the table laugh. Underneath, she is quietly falling apart.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT 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.
Meet The Filmmakers
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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.
hedyehfalsafi.com -
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.
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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.
Your Help
ALMOST HOME is a fiscally sponsored project of Cinematography for Actors, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Your donation will be tax-deductible!