It’s been a whirlwind year for Cypriot filmmaker Myrsini Aristidou, whose 2026 started with a triumphant trip to Park City, where her debut feature, “Hold Onto Me,” won the audience prize in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance. Then, in September, the film made history when it was tapped to represent Cyprus in the international feature race at the Academy Awards — the first time the small island nation has submitted a film for what was formerly the foreign-language category.
Now, after a pair of sold-out screenings at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where “Hold Onto Me” plays in the Meet the Neighbors+ competition, Aristidou is packing her bags for the U.S., where her scrappy debut begins its Oscar campaign.
The 36-year-old has barely had time to catch her breath.
“It’s a great achievement, but it brings a lot of responsibility and a lot of work that comes with that,” she says. “I have no idea of what our chances are, to be honest. I’ve never done this before. Cyprus is a very small country. I really feel like we’re underdogs. We don’t have a lot of money to do the campaign. We’re just doing the best we can.”
“Hold Onto Me” follows free-spirited 11-year-old Iris, played by newcomer Maria Petrova, whose summer fun is interrupted by the arrival in town of her estranged father Aris, played by Christos Passalis (“Dogtooth”). A reluctant dad who’s only returned for his own father’s funeral, Aris rebuffs his daughter’s efforts to reconnect. But her persistence gradually thaws his heart, offering the hope — if not the promise — of eventually rebuilding their fractured relationship.
In a glowing Sundance review, Variety’s Carlos Aguilar praised the “heartfelt drama,” noting that while the film “treads in familiar waters,” Aristidou’s “astute writing and assuredly bittersweet performance take the story into singular, surprising places.” “Hold Onto Me” is produced by Filmblades and One Six One Films, in co-production with Fredo Pictures and Graal Films. Cercamon is handling world sales.
Speaking to Variety in Thessaloniki, Aristidou explains how the film marked a homecoming after seven years in the U.S., where she studied film as an undergraduate at New York City’s Pratt Institute before getting her master’s degree at NYU.
“It was a big decision to leave the U.S. and…go back to my country and make a Greek-language film and shoot it where I grew up,” she says. “It was important to me to capture the textures of everyday life [in Cyprus]: the worn-out backdrops,the slow movement of time and the raw emotional undercurrents that continue to shape us.”
It is a story, too, that hits close to home for the director, whose parents divorced when she was a young girl. “The emotion is very personal — the emotion of reconnecting with someone that is supposed to be your father, but you don’t really know him,” she says.
That feeling anchors the “unorthodox, unconventional relationship” at the heart of “Hold Onto Me.” “What I cared about a lot was this awkwardness in the beginning, where you’re supposed to love this person — you’re supposed to already have a bond with this person that’s your father, but you don’t,” she says. “So you’re starting to build it, and you don’t even know how to approach it. You’re shy, you’re resisting.” When her own father returned to her life years later, when she was a teenage girl, Aristidou says “he ended up being more of a friend than a father figure.”
The puckish give-and-take between Iris and Aris that leads to the gradual thaw in their relationship owes to spell-binding performances from Passalis — a Greek Weird Wave stalwart — and Petrova, who was discovered by casting director Daina Papadaki during the search for a non-professional lead.
“She’s a very mature kid,” Aristidou says. “She’s very deep. She’s very stoic as a person.” When the director told Petrova that she was “going to carry this entire movie” on her young shoulders, Aristidou says the 11-year-old didn’t blink.
The on-screen chemistry between the film’s two stars wasn’t simply a consequence of stellar acting and direction. Passalis, who’d been shooting another film during pre-production for “Hold Onto Me,” was laid low with COVID just as principal photography was about to begin. Cast and crew were left with no time to rehearse.
“We just read the script the day before the shoot, and then we started shooting,” says Aristidou. “[Petrova] didn’t really like [Passalis] in the beginning. So it was beautiful, because their bond was being built while we were shooting, and it was also happening in the film. That was happening in parallel, while they were getting to know each other in real life,” she adds. “So there’s a lot of truth in their reactions [to each other].”
Call it serendipity, if you must. But as she begins a historic Oscar campaign for her native Cyprus, Aristidou suggests that perhaps the stars aligned in her favor for a reason, explaining how she’s constantly “open to life and to what it brings.”
“I’ve learned a lot. And I think the most important was to not push things when they’re not ready to happen. And just to flow,” she says. “I’m a very determined person, so I always had a very clear view of where I wanted to go. And it never worked out that way,” she continues. “I always end up close to where I imagined I would be. But it was through different paths. You can never really plan.”
The Thessaloniki Film Festival runs Nov. 5 – 15.