Harry Ayiotis

Writer / Director

Cyprus

I am a former lawyer turned self-taught filmmaker from Cyprus who has written and directed three short films. I have worked as a camera assistant and DIT in feature films before writing and directing my own work. My shorts have been selected to various festivals and have won awards all around the world.
I am now working in television development in Germany. In 2017, I co-developed the pilot and bible for “The Midnight Shift” as part of the Midpoint TV Launch program. The project won the Best Series Concept HBO Europe Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival 2017. This year I have graduated from Serial Eyes, a Berlin based post graduate program on television development. I am currently working on developing two of my own original television series with a German producer and one as a co-developer with HBO Europe in the Czech Republic.

Project

Psychedelicatessen

This is a story of grief, memory and atonement taking place in the course of one single night in the last divided capital in the world, Nicosia, Cyprus. Mario, a charming drug dealer, is losing his grip on reality. A deeply buried trauma he can’t remember is causing him frequent disassociate blackouts. Taking the advice of his therapist, Mario undergoes an experimental drug treatment intended for grief relief. During the session, a technical glitch sends Mario down a spiral of psychedelic psychosis as he hallucinates a young girl who claims to be his dead daughter.

During this nocturnal odyssey, Mario will be dead-set on keeping the trip going out of fear he will lose his child again. The only one who can help him is his estranged sister Salome who runs an underground grief relief center fueled by the black market version of the drug. Salome will try to guide Mario out of his trip, terrified of what would happen if he remembered a memory so painful it would tear him apart.