The Story
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.
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, neither of which fully claims her.
Director's Statement
As an Iranian immigrant, I make films from inside the immigration experience, not about it.
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 sister’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.
What stayed with me was how little of it ever gets said out loud, and how ordinary the waiting looks from the outside. Millions 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.
Hedyeh Falsafi, Writer and Director
Why This Story
. Written and directed by an Iranian immigrant woman, this story comes from the inside.
. Speaks directly to the millions living in U.S. immigration limbo today.
. Explores diaspora identity, mental health, and the loneliness of digital connection. Themes that cross every border.
. Urgently timely: as U.S.–Iran tensions escalate in the real world, Leyla's story is no longer hypothetical.
. A universal story told through a specific life, the way the best short films always work.
Tone & Style
. Realism meets poetic stillness
. Intimate, cinematic, emotionally restrained
. Bilingual storytelling: Farsi and English
. Visual references: Past Lives, Aftersun, The Lost Daughter, Saint Omer
. Aesthetic: muted warm tones, natural light, stillness interrupted by digital noise
. The phone screen is a character, social media scrolling as interiority