True Story
My Family Trees is a bittersweet tale about a man from Iran who took unconventional measures to stitch his family back together in Kansas...one single tree at a time. It's a short documentary that spotlights the ways love, duty, and inexplicable hope make us uniquely human, and beautifully resilient.
About the filmmaker
Roshi Givechi is a designer and problem-solver by day.
My Family Trees is her first film.
Except for 2 moments that were impossible for her to capture with her own hands (one would have implied she’s freakishly tall, and the other would have implied she could step back in time), she shot everything on her (wait for it…) iPhone 6s. She wishes that her iPhone 11 was in her hands a few years ago.
While she had inched forward on the making of this first short doc over a few years — sometimes not touching it for a year — she owes getting across the finish line to many things. Here are a few of those things:
a creative sabbatical in 2018
friends who lit a match under her ass to get it done
a desire to punctuate 2020 with something else
friends’ intros to her amazing crew
good timing
the crew’s willingness to try her crazy “Film Sprint”
creative friends who formally helped her realize a vision
a show of $$ confidence from her 3 executive producers
love & pom poms from friends and family
and
Laverne & Shirley’s theme song as her daily mantra
Her next film is an animated short doc, which she needs to dust off soon.
