The international feature Oscar race is fought with campaign budgets as much as with festival laurels, and Cyprus is entering it for the first time with plenty of the second and very little of the first. Its candidate is Hold Onto Me (Κράτα Με), the debut feature of Cypriot writer-director Myrsini Aristidou, which won the audience award in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance and now heads to the United States to court Academy voters.

Aristidou is not pretending otherwise. Speaking to Variety’s Christopher Vourlias at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the film sold out two screenings in the Meet the Neighbors+ competition, she was blunt: “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.”

The film itself is an intimate bet. Newcomer Maria Petrova plays Iris, a free-spirited 11-year-old whose summer is upended when her estranged father Aris returns to town for his own father’s funeral. Aris, played by Christos Passalis, a Greek Weird Wave stalwart who appeared in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth, rebuffs her attempts to reconnect until her persistence slowly thaws him. Reviewing it out of Sundance for Variety, Carlos Aguilar wrote that while the drama “treads in familiar waters,” Aristidou’s “astute writing and assuredly bittersweet performance take the story into singular, surprising places.”

It is also a homecoming. Aristidou spent seven years in the US, studying film at New York’s Pratt Institute and then earning a master’s degree at NYU, before deciding to go back and make a Greek-language film where she grew up. The story is personal: her parents divorced when she was a young girl, and when her father returned to her life in her teens, she says, he became “more of a friend than a father figure.” That awkwardness is what she wanted on screen: “You’re supposed to already have a bond with this person that’s your father, but you don’t.”

The campaign rests on a small European co-production. Filmblades and One Six One Films produced, with Fredo Pictures and Graal Films as co-producers, and Cercamon is handling world sales. Petrova was discovered by casting director Daina Papadaki during a search for a non-professional lead. Cyprus selected the film as its submission in September; once the Thessaloniki festival wraps on Nov. 15, the 36-year-old director takes it to the US to begin the awards push.

Even the film’s central relationship was built on the run: Passalis came down with COVID just before principal photography, wiping out rehearsals, and the cast read the script the day before shooting. Petrova, Aristidou recalls, “didn’t really like [Passalis] in the beginning” — so the father-daughter bond Cyprus is now carrying to Academy voters was forged in front of the camera, while the two actors were still getting to know each other.