Having spent years trying to visualise her mother’s childhood in the now occupied town of Varosha, Cyprus, the filmmaker finally returns to the ruins of her ancestral home, 46 years after her mother was forcibly displaced.

“I never knew my mother’s hometown growing up. She barely knew it herself. My mother is from the so-called ghost town of Varosha, in the occupied north of Cyprus. Forced to flee at the tender age of 14 in the midst of war, she thought she’d be back in a few days. Fifty two years after that fateful day in August 1974, she still hasn’t returned, and our lives continue to be upended by her loss. Unsettled is a journey that pieces together my mother’s past, a document of our joint attempts at filling in the blanks that displacement has forced onto our family story. The film blends observational footage with poetic sequences of family archives and is based on a live documentary performance I created as a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College, in 2024, which enjoyed sold out shows in London, Nicosia, and New York,” director/producer Argyro Nicolaou told FNE.

The film is produced by Argyro Nicolaou through Silver Daze Films (Cyprus) and coproduced by Keti Papadema through Liminal Films (Cyprus), with the director/producer largely self-financing the project alongside in-kind camera and sound equipment contributions from Liminal Films.

The production has also received support from the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, New York. To complete the film, the team intends to seek postproduction grants from both the Doha Film Institute and the Department of Contemporary Culture – Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture.

Filming for the 60,000 EUR micro-budget documentary has been underway every summer since 2020 in the Cypriot regions of Famagusta and Nicosia, with final shoot days wrapping in the winter of 2026. The project is set to enter postproduction in early 2027, with full completion expected by the autumn of 2027.

On the international circuit, the project participated in the UnionDocs Early Production Lab in 2024 and was subsequently selected for the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Film Festival Works-in-Progress section in March 2025.

The producers aim to premiere the film at an international festival with a strong non-fiction profile, while simultaneously developing a distribution strategy targeted at human rights and refugee organisations, as well as the Cypriot diaspora across Europe and North America.

Argyro Nicolaou is a NYC-based Cypriot filmmaker, writer, and researcher. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Bard College. A member of the European Film Academy, her work includes curated programmes for the Cyprus Film Days International Festival and short films that have screened internationally. She is currently developing her first feature fiction film Excavators (produced by Caretta Films), winner of connecting cottbus Jury and Audience Awards in 2023. 

Production Information:

Producer:
Silver Daze Films (Cyprus)
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Coproducer:
Liminal Films (Cyprus)

Credits:
Director: Argyro Nicolaou
DoP: Argyro Nicolaou
Editor: Argyro Nicolaou