Hold Me Down

Hold Me Down (2017)

Based on true events, Hold Me Down depicts a day in the life of a 19-year-old single mother in the Bronx who works as a stripper at an illegal nightclub to support her child.

Date of release
2017-08-16
TMDB
1.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
30m
Genres
Drama
Director
Niclas Gillis

Casting

Interesting facts

Hold Me Down is a 2017 Swedish-American drama short film written and directed by Niclas Gillis. The story is based on true events and features a cast of non-actors from the Bronx, New York; among them Tianna Allen, Tanisha Lambright, Cheryl Juniaus, and Prince Combs. The title is American slang, meaning "be there for me".

Production

Niclas Gillis first became aware of the issues that the film addresses when he moved to New York from his native Sweden in 2009, then 19 years of age. As one of the only white male students living on campus at the college he attended, he was invited by fellow residents to what he thought would be a regular house party in Harlem but that proved to be an illicit event similar to the one depicted in the film.

Jarred by what he witnessed and the understanding that her predicament was not unique, Gillis began to more seriously study U.S. history and its bearings on present-day socioeconomics. Upon realizing the scope of the problem - what he perceived to be gross societal inequities - and feeling that that "reality" had not been adequately documented, Gillis set out to make a film that he hoped would shed light on some of the struggles endured by women…

In January, 2014, Gillis revisited a similar event for the purpose of getting in touch with the women affected and begin the project. At a blacked-out barbershop in Queens that served as a brothel at night, Gillis met Unique Adams, a young woman then pregnant with her first child.

When the screenplay was completed, Adams introduced Gillis to Prince Combs, a Bronx resident familiar to the "after-hours" circuit. Impressed by the authenticity of the screenplay and what he perceived to be an important subject, Combs came on board as Associate Producer in the summer of 2014 and would remain Gillis' closest collaborator for the next several years.

To go into production, Gillis raised 70,000 dollars through private sponsors (Michael Huffington, Jacqueline Gill, and Ruth and Hans Blixt), and 30,000 dollars via Kickstarter together with co-EP Lucy Bidwell, in addition to the 47,000 dollars that he personally borrowed and the 30,000 dollars that More Media lent to the production on the hope that the film would eventually be picked up by The Swedish Film Institute.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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