ΚΡΑΤΑ ΜΕ
Cyprus, Greece, Denmark
2026 | 102 min. | Fiction

Eleven-year-old Iris barely remembers her estranged father, Aris. When he returns to town for his own father’s funeral, she becomes determined to find out who he is.

Their first real encounter comes when Iris gets into trouble with the police. With her mother away, Aris is called to collect her. He reluctantly gets her out, takes the money she owes him from her own pocket, and leaves her by the side of the road.

But Iris seeks him out again.

She finds Aris in a dilapidated shipyard, surrounded by the remnants of the life he left behind. He wants nothing to do with fatherhood, and Iris quickly discovers that the father she imagined bears little resemblance to the man in front of her. He is selfish, unreliable and, much of the time, difficult to like. Still, she keeps returning.

When Aris realizes that people trust him more with a child by his side, he begins drawing Iris into his petty schemes. What starts as convenience slowly becomes companionship. Between scams, arguments and unexpected moments of tenderness, Iris begins to see something in the father who disappointed her, while Aris finds himself caring for the daughter he never learned how to know.

For a brief moment, two strangers begin to become father and daughter.

But Aris is a man accustomed to running away. As debts from his past close in, his instinct is to disappear once again. This time, however, leaving means abandoning more than a place. Iris must decide what to make of the imperfect father she has found, while Aris is forced to confront the choice he has avoided all his life: walk away, or finally show up for his daughter.

Directed by: Myrsini Aristidou
Written by: Myrsini Aristidou
Produced by: Monica Nicolaidou, Myrsini Aristidou, Anders N.U. Berg, Rena Vougioukalou, Konstantina Stavrianou
Cinematography: Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll
Editing: Myrsini Aristidou, Jenna Mangulad
Production Design: Dimitra Sourlantzi
Costume Design: Sasia Paloudan
Make-Up & Hair: Ioanna Nika, Giorgos Vavanos, Sotiris Foiniris
Original Score: Alex Weston
Sound: Stavros Terlikkas, Christos Kyriakoullis, Kostas Varympopiotis
Casting: Daina Papadaki, Lydia Georgana, Michalis Michaelides
Cast: Christos Passalis (Aris), Maria Petrova (Iris), Aulona Lupa (Stella), Jenny Sallo (Danae), Achilleas Grammatikopoulos (Elias)

Statement of the director:
HOLD ONTO ME is the final part of a journey that began with my short films SEMELE and ARIA, each exploring the evolving bond between a father and daughter during the preteen and teenage years. Together, the films form a triptych. In SEMELE, there is childhood innocence and a need for love. In ARIA, the relationship becomes more complicated, filled with disappointment and a search for identity. In HOLD ONTO ME, the circle closes with something I had been searching for all along, forgiveness and a chance to coexist.

The film follows eleven year old Iris as she seeks out her estranged father. She barely knows him, and perhaps what she is searching for is as much the idea of a father as the man himself. When she finds Aris, she begins to understand that he too is simply a human being, imperfect and full of weaknesses.

I was drawn to Iris at this particular age because it exists on a threshold. The magic of childhood is still present, but reality is beginning to appear unfiltered. There is a vulnerability in realizing that the people you imagined would have all the answers are as lost and fallible as anyone else.

Drawing from my own experience, I wanted to explore the longing that forms in the absence of a father. What interested me was not an easy story of reconciliation, but the fragile beginnings of a relationship that never had the space to become one.

Iris does not immediately love the father she finds. She watches him, questions him and is not even sure she likes him. Aris does not suddenly become a father simply because his daughter appears. Their relationship grows through conflict, humor, silence and small gestures of care. Slowly, they begin to recognize one another. To truly see another person means accepting their limitations alongside our own expectations of them. It does not erase disappointment or excuse absence, but it can create the possibility of meeting each other where we actually are.

The film was shot entirely in Cyprus, where I was born and raised, but Cyprus is never specifically named, because it does not matter. Their relationship matters, and it could happen anywhere. Returning from America to make my first feature where I grew up was nevertheless deeply personal, allowing me to see my country again as an adult and understand things about my own past and present.

I was drawn to its worn out backdrops, the languor of summer, the sound of cicadas, and a forgotten shipyard that holds both nostalgia and the possibility of repair. It is a place where broken things are fixed, but also where boats are prepared to travel toward the horizon, toward a far away freedom.

There is also a political or geopolitical depth beneath the story. Iris is small and overlooked, searching for a father, an adult who might finally stand up and protect her. In a sense, she could represent Cyprus itself, hoping that those more powerful will protect it. In the film, something eventually happens. In the history of the place I come from, we are still waiting.

But this longing reaches beyond a father and daughter, or a small country. From childhood onward, we build expectations around protection. We want to believe there is someone above us, an "eye in the sky", who knows more than we do, who is watching and will know what to do when we do not. As children, that figure might be a father. As citizens, we place that expectation in the state. And on an existential level, many of us place it in God.

Perhaps what connects these relationships is not only our need for protection, but our need to believe that someone or something larger than ourselves is in control. That there is an order to things, and that when something goes wrong, someone will intervene.

But what happens when no one does? What happens to our relationship with a father who was not there, with a state that failed to protect us, or with God in the face of suffering? Perhaps the rupture comes not only from their absence, but from the collapse of what we believed they were supposed to be. We are left to reconcile reality with the expectations we built around it.

Iris has a capacity for forgiveness that I think children often possess more naturally than adults. She can be disappointed in Aris, angry with him, even unsure whether she likes him, and still remain open to him. She does not need him to become the father she imagined in order for a relationship between them to become possible.

Perhaps forgiveness begins there. Not in forgetting or excusing what has failed us, but in letting go of the expectation that it must become what we imagined before we can accept it. Whether that relationship is with a parent, our country, faith, or ourselves, perhaps reconciliation begins when we allow reality to exist outside our expectations of it.

And perhaps growing up is partly the gradual loss of the belief that someone else will always know what to do. At some point, the question changes from who will protect us to whom we are capable of protecting. We begin by looking outward for something to hold us, but eventually we are asked to become responsible for ourselves and for one another.

For me, cinema has always been a way of expressing emotions that words are sometimes not enough to contain. It allows us to sit in the dark with strangers and, for a moment, share something together.

Ultimately, HOLD ONTO ME is about love, forgiveness and our responsibility toward one another. It is about presence after absence, about seeing and being seen, and about accepting that the people we need may be as imperfect and vulnerable as we are.

Perhaps growing up is learning to see that without losing our need to reach for one another.

Production:
Filmblades
https://filmblades.com/

World Sales:
Cercamon
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Press/social media agency:
THAT Agency (CUBIKS COMMUNICATIONS LTD)
https://www.itsthat.agency/