‘Hold Onto Me’: Father-Daughter Film Is First Cyprus Oscar Submission

It’s summertime in Cyprus. Iris, 11, spends her days with her older best friend, Danae. But then she hears that her grandfather has died. Visiting town for his funeral is Iris’ father, Aris, whom she has never known.

That is the starting point for Hold Onto Me, the feature debut of writer-director Myrsini Aristidou. Can Iris and Aris find a way to connect, even though he is a petty criminal and doesn’t want to take responsibility? Iris doesn’t give up and gets involved in his various schemes, despite warnings from her mother and her older brother. What begins as a stubborn attempt to reconnect slowly unfolds into a fragile bond. But then, Aris’ dark past gets them into trouble.

Hold Onto Me, starring newcomer Maria Petrova and Christos Passalis (Dogtooth), premiered at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award. It then became Cyprus’ first-ever international feature film Oscar submission.

Now, the film screens in the Just Film youth and children’s event of the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. Cercamon is handling sales.

Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll was the cinematographer on the Cyprus-Denmark-Greece co-production. The editors were Jenna Mangulad and Aristidou. Aristidou and Monica Nicolaidou produced the film, with Thomas J. Mangan IV and Mark Hollinger as the executive producers and Anders N.U. Berg, Konstantina Stavrianou and Rena Vougioukalou as co-producers.

Watch a trailer for the film right here.

Aristidou talked to THR about her bittersweet first feature, pairing an unknown as the young girl at the heart of it with the man who played the son in Dogtooth, her desire to make Hold Onto Me feel different and that first-ever Cypriot Oscar submission.

The father-daughter theme is one that the filmmaker has also explored in two shorts. “I feel like this is like a triptych,” Aristidou tells THR. “My first short film called Semele in 2015 is also a father and daughter story and was the first time that I began exploring this theme. Then I did my second short film, Aria, which has a father daughter dynamic again, but with an older daughter – she’s a teenager. They were short, and I wanted to go deeper in this subject matter.”

Hold Onto Me allowed her to do so in feature form, but she wanted it to be surprising and different from other films about similar familial relationships. “I wanted to use the archetypical relationship of father and daughter within a love story,” she explains. “It’s kind of a love story. It’s about two people who don’t know how to be together. They are sort of strangers in the beginning. They meet, then slowly come together, and they end up accepting each other or even loving each other in their own way. And when you set this up within the framework of a father, daughter and their family, it creates a different energy.”

That is driven by societal expectations we have for family members. “When someone is your family, you are expected to love them, or you have more expectations than from just any stranger,” Aristidou highlights. “However, they are strangers. They have never really met or had any shared experiences. So this is the first time they are reconnecting, and I wanted to explore this.”

The characters and story of Hold Onto Me keep developing as the movie unfolds, and that is by design. “On a first feature, it’s very easy to get very obsessed with what you want to do, so I was very tough on myself,” Aristidou tells THR. “When it comes to narrative structure and characters, I like to move the story forward in every scene. When I was writing, I was really thinking about that.”

One key reason that the filmmaker has returned to father-daughter stories lies in her own life experience. “It’s very personal in many ways,” she shares. “My parents divorced when I was very young, and I was not really growing up with my dad. He wasn’t entirely gone like this character, but he was not that present. And he’s not a criminal but a writer. It was only when I turned 12 or 13 that we started having more of a relationship. And when I was 15, 16, we really bonded. We reached a point where we started talking about everything and we really forgave each other. We reconnected, and there was really an understanding and acceptance.”

The film’s setting is also personal. Hold Onto Me was shot in Cyprus, and for the writer-director, it was particularly important to film near the sea. “I grew up near the sea, so there are references that are very personal,” Aristidou tells THR. “My dad used to have a small boat when I was a kid. I also always used to hang out with older kids because I had an older friend who was my best friend. There is a lot of truth in the film.”

The chemistry between Iris and Aris in the film is palpable To ensure the right fit, casting took a lot of time. “We were shooting in July. Around April, I decided I was going to work with Christos,” the director recalls. She wanted to see him interact with different kids, most of them in Athens. The actor then went to Cyprus to meet the girl who ended up making the cut. “I saw Christos with Maria, and they felt family in a strange way,” Aristidou tells THR. “They phsically have things in common and look a bit like family. But Maria had zero experience. She had never done anything [in acting]. But I felt that there was something with them.”

With the big casting decisions made, she was hoping to rehearse with the two leads, but that didn’t work out. “Christos was shooting something. And then, he got COVID, so he only arrived a day before the shoot,” she recalls. “We only read the script once, and then I just started shooting with both of them. So I just threw Maria into the wild with him. But I think it worked out perfectly because they didn’t know each other really – just like their characters.”

The Oscar submission was, of course, special for the writer-director feel, especially since it’s the first for Cyprus. “It’s a big honor,” Aristidou shares. “I suddenly felt very responsible for my whole country. But in many ways, this film and I are carving this path for Cyprus. There was no film from Cyprus in Sundance before, and then we won an audience award. And then the Oscars. I guess it’s a new thing for everyone here and for me. So I’m learning a lot in the process. I know we’re a bit of the underdogs, but I’m trying to enjoy the ride.”

So, what’s next for the filmmaker? “I really love this dynamic of strangers coming together and realizing how similar they are or bonding,” Aristidou says. “I don’t think I would do a father-daughter film again. But there’s something about this narrative arc that I really love. Actually, I’m trying to work on a TV show, which is a crime, spy thriller. But, let’s see. I’m working on a couple of things, and I’m reading a lot of scripts because my agents in the U.S. are sending a lot of scripts to read. So I’m also open to directing something I haven’t written.”