"Hold On"

When John Smith approached Stassmonster and me to direct “Hold On,” I didn’t know we shared the same homeland. Discovering we were both Welsh changed everything.

As with all our creative treatments, the song lived on repeat while we built the concept. What emerged was a psychedelic love letter to Wales — a meditation on longing, memory and identity.

The COVID pandemic had made travel nearly impossible. While the United States has been home to me for nearly two decades, Wales remains my motherland. A land of song, myth and quiet magic. Being unable to return left a lingering sense of hiraeth — the Welsh word for a deep, untranslatable longing for home.

This film became a way to explore that feeling.

Shot across both South and North Wales, the landscapes are deeply personal. The moors above Markham. The lanes dropping into Wattsville. Valley towns frozen in time. These southern Wales moments were woven together with John’s northern touchstones — fog-laden forests and the summit of Moel Arthur, where the mountain disappeared into almost celestial cloud.

On the day we filmed the mountaintop sequence, the fog rolled in without warning. Wales shifted the tone for us. The land became a character.

Visually, I leaned into a painstaking frame-by-frame masking process, allowing John to drift in and out of memory. Presence becomes unstable. Is he there? Is he remembering? Is he gone? The film never answers. It invites the viewer into a suspended, dreamlike state.

The final layer came through John’s performances — grounded, intimate, and set against mythical landscapes. The result is both personal and expansive: a meditation on home, identity and the places that shape us long after we leave.