S Viswanath

Fractured family ties have been familiar template for filmmakers focusing on adverse effects they have on children while estranged couples nonchalantly embark their separate paths without as much as a thought to their young ones.

While elders go about their lives taking their rancour and ruptured relations into their stride, the children, on the other hand, are unable to assimilate the dissonance and disarray in their lives caught betwixt their feuding parents as to where their loyalties lie.

Spotlighting on one such universal theme with delectable direction and sensitive exploration is the debutant directorial feature Hold Onto Me (Krata Me) by Cypriot director Myrsini Aristidou. Born and raised in Limassol, Cyprus, who, after formal education in film direction in New York University, went on to found her own international production company – One Six One Films.

Incidentally, Aristidou, who brings in that perspective ‘female gaze’ into her works as a woman director, continues her ruminations and reflections, searing exploration and examination, digging deep into the complexities of family relationships, particularly focusing on dad-daughter dynamics as she did so in her short films Semele and Aria, that have garnered due recognition and reward winning her due accolades and appreciation.

The reasons for Aristidou’s proclivity towards such narrative plotlines are not far to pursue after. As the director herself pithily puts it “my brother and I were raised by my mother, and would see our father occasionally, as he also lived in Cyprus, not far from us. When I was young, we didn’t have a close relationship; however, as I grew older we came closer, and I have come to accept and love him exactly as he is. However, I do acknowledge that I grew up without a father figure in my life, and that definitely has defined my character and personality. Sometimes I still wonder how a healthy relationship between a daughter and a father is meant to be. Nevertheless, my film is intent on this confrontation; as Iris wants very much to create a bond.”

Backed by Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture, the Cypriot-Danish-Greek-US co-production film, which won the Audience Award in World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance Film Festival, Special Mention International Competition Winner at Sofia International Film Festival, Orpheus Award Best Feature Film at Los Angeles Greek Film Festival and a clutch of Cyprus’s Film Days International Festival awards, by Myrsini Aristidou, has indeed come a long way wowing audiences and discerning critics alike.

The film, screened at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, in the festival’s Horizons Section, where this critic had the opportunity to watch the fantabulous feature, reminds one of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells directorial debut – the 2022 film – Aftersun which too revolved around a 11-year-old, Sophie, bonding with her dad Calum coming to terms with his fatherhood and the weight of expectations from him.

Likewise, in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, you have 11-year-old Iris, a carefree chip of a waifish, wild, defiant and ‘stubborn as a mule’ no-nonsense girl caught in a combative companionship with her estranged, felonious, absentee grifter of a failed father Aris.

With the height of six week halcyon summer vacation and schools shut providing the young Iris ample idle time on her hand to laze and loiter, sees the carefree child of nature, wandering around the sea kissed City and its shorelines in gay abandon along with her much older playmate Danae, with her mother having ditched her and her elder brother Fivos, to go on a romp with here new found mate leaving Iris to her own devices and doings, after putting a few chips in her hand.

The young, yearning lass, lost in solitude and familial anchor, stoically indulges in with Danae, who, makes most of her own youthful disposition with much adultish adventures, in keeping her with first stirrings of adulthood, while Iris watches from the sidelines with a sense of detached indulgence, in between passing asides at the elders playing cards or otherwise roaming around the shoreline.

Furthermore, though Iris, is left to her own devices as the adult go about their doings, like her Danae who cavorts with the local boy and his companions, or her own dad busy with his job of repairing a boat, she, however, candidly captures all things happening around her calculatively assessing them.
However, the news about the arrival of her father gives the young, lost and rather lonesome Iris a new sense of meaning and purpose. Chancing upon his return to Cyprus for her granddad’s (his father’s) funeral, she, in the course of their rendezvouses, in an effort to bring in a sense of reality into her otherwise void and vacuous world, we witness young Iris desperately latch onto her long lost dad as if a new meaning has dawned on her rudderless routine.

Further, what prompts the 11-year-old to pitch for her pater is his abject regard to the rules that govern the norm social transactions, as she stalks and spies on him and his nefarious activities while slowly, but surely, stitching a rather tenuous but tensile tie as each try to comprehend and measure one other and come to terms with in each other company in the wake of the new companionship brought together by different circumstances.

Learning her father after all is a trickster, deep in debt, hoodwinking witless people naïve enough to believe his sales talk and fall for his tricks, the young Iris, wilfully becomes his ‘partner in crime’ acting as an active accomplice in the con jobs he takes luring gullible people into buying everyday articles they would otherwise not need at all with his smooth, convincing glib sales chat.

The two, initially distrustful, measuring and tentatively seeking out each other, with their convincing tricks or two fatefully pull off pretty scams together all the while stitching a fragile bond while the filmmaker through deftness of craft and nuances of her narrative acumen captures and probes the dad-daughter relationship with her versatility of cinematic vision.

The nature of their bonding and where the two’s subsequent sojourns is headed is metaphorically shown when the young Iris, is spirited away by the boat owner while trying to escape from his clutches, results in her long lost dad reluctantly and as fraternal duty arriving at the station, to bail her out, bilking out the pocket money she has on her, even as the station officer fails to get a word out of the temperamental, tough, headstrong, stubborn girl.

With the rough sea and the vast expansive shoreline, the shipyard all providing the convenient canvas for the familial drama to playout, we watch how two outsiders and outcasts, ultimately unite deigned by destiny and discover themselves in the faults and failings of each and the strength they drive from one other’s company.

The film, shot across Limassol, Nicosia and nearby coastal towns, with the sea, the sun kissed sandy shore, the distant horizon all become motifs, and also filmed partly in a decaying shipyard, a site of predominant action in the film, which becomes a powerful symbol in itself in the narrative, bespeaks of the director’s filmmaking style of “adapt(ing) the shooting style to the energy of the location where the film takes place.”

Shrewd that she is with the cinematic artistry that Aristidou paints a poignant parallel between her young protagonist and the film’s setting with “the shipyard being more than just a location; it reflects the emotional neglect and abandonment that Iris feels in her relationship with her father. It’s a liminal space: forgotten by time, suspended between land and sea, much like Iris and Aris, trapped between a past they can’t escape and a future they don’t exactly know how to enter.”

As filmmaker Myrsini Aristidou succinctly sums up her fascinating film theirs is a “shared sense of solitude. Iris is surrounded by friends, yet she remains an outsider; he is an outsider as well. They’re both outcasts who eventually find each other. At first, the relationship begins pragmatically – he finds her useful to help him with his schemes. But slowly, they grow on each other. They’re both adaptable and very “smart on their feet”. They know how to navigate their surroundings and make the best of difficult circumstances.”

What makes Hold Onto Me even more memorable and magical entrenching itself in the recess of one’s psyche and keep reflecting on it is the superlative and superb performance by the talented young Maria Petrova who simply bowls one over carrying the onerous burden of the film’s awesome appeal on her rather frail shoulders. She is equally complemented as a perfect foil by the much elder and seasoned Christos Passalis of the 2009 Greek absurdist psychological drama Dogtooth fame by Yorgos Lanthimos.