Semele (2015)

At just thirteen minutes long, Semele is a Cypriot short film from 2015, co-produced across Cyprus, Greece and the United States under the Paris Film banner. The film takes its name from its young protagonist, a girl of around eleven who turns up unannounced at her father's construction worksite, note from school in hand, needing a signature. What follows is a brief but closely observed portrait of a father-daughter relationship that is, to put it charitably, complicated. The film sits within a tradition of Mediterranean short-form drama that finds the weight of everyday family life in small, contained moments, a mode that has produced some genuinely affecting work when the material and the execution align. For a sense of how Cypriot cinema has been approaching similarly personal, domestic territory in recent years, my review of All That's Left of You (2025) is worth a look.

The film is directed by Myrsini Aristidou, working here in what appears to be an early short-form project. Short filmmaking, particularly at this length, is a genuinely demanding form: there is very little room to establish character, build atmosphere and land an emotional moment all at once, and the runtime here leaves no margin for error. The principal cast includes Vasiliki Kokkoliadi, Yannis Stankoglou, Athos Antoniou, Kimonas Apostolopoulos and Paris Aristides. The child-and-parent dynamic at the centre of the story is the kind of territory that short drama returns to repeatedly, and with good reason: it is emotionally rich and recognisable. That said, whether the execution earns the emotional response it seems to be reaching for is very much the question. 2015 was a year with no shortage of short and feature-length drama taking on similar themes of childhood longing and fractured family bonds, with films like Mustang (2015) demonstrating what that territory could look like at its most assured.

The premise itself is straightforward, even deceptively simple: a child travels to find a parent, seeking something that is at least partly just acknowledgement. Films built around children in adult spaces, navigating the emotional wreckage of family life, can be quietly devastating when the pieces fall into place. Whether Semele manages that, or whether the brevity of the format leaves it feeling more like a sketch than a story, is precisely what any honest viewing has to reckon with. It is the kind of short that invites you to read significance into its silences, and that can be a polished but unremarkable quality depending on your patience for it.

A-Z World Movie Tour Cyprus https://vimeo.com/244970747 This short was kind of pointless. A young girl (probably around 10) hitchhikes to her fathers work to get a letter signed for school. The rest of the movie highlights their difficult relationship and briefly mentions the mother, who Semele has a difficult relationship with too. Other than that she just disobeys her father, becomes a nuisance, causes him stress. This movie did feel like a whole lot of nothing

I ended up finding the film on Vimeo, which is how a lot of these short-form productions reach an audience outside of the festival circuit, and I think that context matters. There is something about watching a thirteen-minute film online, with no surrounding programme to give it weight, that can strip away whatever atmosphere it was hoping to create. The bones of a more affecting story are there, a kid who just wants to be seen, a father too distracted or too uncomfortable to give her that, but it never quite builds into anything that stays with you once the window closes. For what it is worth, I have seen short dramas from the same era that manage to do considerably more with a similar setup, and if you want a sense of what engaged, character-led drama from the 2010s can look like, my reviews of Luigi (2013) and Lost Boy in Juba (2017) cover ground that, for me, felt a good deal more purposeful. Sometimes a short film earns its brevity. Sometimes it just stops.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2015  | Watched: 2025-06-09

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Semele (2015) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US

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