Eleven-year-old Iris has a father she barely knows. When he returns to Cyprus after years away to bury his own father, she sets out to track him down, and then refuses to let go. Hold Onto Me is a warm, funny and tender summer film about two stubborn people slowly discovering that they might need each other after all. The first Cypriot film ever to play Sundance, where it won the audience award.
It is the height of summer in Cyprus, the kind of heat in which nobody moves and the cicadas are the only sound. This is where Iris drifts about, a little feral, with no one to set boundaries for her. Her father Aris has been out of the picture for years and comes back only to cash in whatever his late father left behind: sell a boat, offload some junk, and disappear again. He tells a police officer, flatly, that the girl is “not my problem”. He has neither the time for her nor a plan.
But Iris latches onto him. She follows him around the shipyard, copies him, echoes his words. And Aris, a charming layabout forever trying to talk his way out of things, discovers that having a cute kid at your side is remarkably handy when you are trying to flog old rubbish at the market. And so, half by accident, something that looks a lot like a bond begins to form: a stolen cigarette here, a breathing exercise there, two people who might both still be children.
There is no grand reconciliation, no bow tied around the ending. What you get are small, hesitant moves toward each other, of the kind you know from your own life.Iris is played by Maria Petrova, a girl who had never acted before and whom you cannot look away from once she is on screen. Opposite her is Christos Passalis, of Dogtooth, as the father who can barely keep his own life on the rails.
Myrsini Aristidou grew up without a father around, and you feel it in every scene: this is not a film about a broken family so much as a film that knows exactly how that feels from the inside. She shot on a derelict shipyard from her own childhood, wedged between land and sea. A place where things are made whole again, boats at least.
Sunny, dryly funny and unexpectedly moving, with a lead you will not forget in a hurry. A film that lives up to its title: you hold onto Iris, and she holds onto you.
