“Hold Onto Me” to premiere at Sundance 2026
HOLD ONTO ME (Krata Me), the highly anticipated debut feature by acclaimed Cypriot writer–director Myrsini Aristidou, is set to make its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Following the global success of her award-winning shorts Semele and Aria, Aristidou delivers an intimate and emotionally resonant family drama that marks her transition into long-form storytelling.
Shot in Cyprus with an international creative team, the film is a Cypriot–Greek–Danish co-production, in joint participation with the United States, supported by the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture, The Danish Film Institute, The EKKOMED, Hellenic Broadcaster/ ERT, and the Black Family Grant of NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Set against the sun-washed backdrop of a coastal Cypriot town, HOLD ONTO ME follows 11-year-old Iris, who spends her summer roaming the streets with her older friend Danae. When she discovers that her estranged father, Aris, has returned for his own father’s funeral, she becomes determined to find him. Iris tracks him down to a dilapidated shipyard, where he has been keeping to himself. What begins as a stubborn attempt to reconnect, slowly turns into a fragile bond — imperfect yet profoundly human.
Aristidou sees the film as the culmination of a trilogy that began with Semele and Aria, each exploring the evolving emotional terrain between a father and daughter. HOLD ONTO ME delves deeper, tracing “the quiet, often unspoken longing that forms in the absence of a
father,” capturing the tentative beginnings of a relationship struggling to find space to exist.
As a Cypriot filmmaker, Aristidou sought to portray the textures of everyday life on the island: “the worn-out backdrops, the slow movement of time, and the raw emotional undercurrents that continue to shape us. In many ways, Iris mirrors Cyprus itself: small, overlooked, marked by absence, yet quietly determined to piece things together.”
