I had just put Xabi in his crib. The house was quiet. And then, my phone lit up.
It was an email from New York. I opened it, standing there in the silence. Shifting Courts had just won Best Open Documentary at the NYU Sports Film Festival.
It was a shock. A strange, beautiful shock. The film had just been projected for the first time, to an audience I couldn’t see, and evaluated by a jury I hadn’t met. And I wasn’t there.
I walked back into the baby’s room. Amaia was there. I told her the news.
She was overjoyed. She almost started to cry. Not just because of the prize, but because she knows exactly what it took to get here.
The heat, the hours, the isolation of doing it alone.
Sometimes, an award is just an object.
But sometimes, it’s gasoline. It’s the motivation you need to keep going.
Still, the feeling of not being in that theater was complicated.
When you are not in the room, what scares you the most is losing control. I worried about the projection.
Will the screen look right?
Will the subtitles fail?
But mostly, I worried about the sound. I had spent endless hours crafting a 5.1 cinema mix, something you can only truly test in a real theater. And I wasn’t there to hear if it worked.
But beyond the technicalities, I missed the aftermath.
A short film is brief by nature. It doesn’t give you all the answers. it just invites you to reflect.
If I had been there, I would have loved to continue the conversation. To clarify the message. To expand the discussion.
But I couldn’t. And maybe, I shouldn’t.
Receiving this recognition from an institution as prestigious as NYU changes things. It pulls you out of your local bubble. It proves that your work doesn’t just hold up at home, but on a global stage. It tells you that the story translates.
But I also know that a viewer in New York doesn’t see the exact same film as someone in Bali. We all watch things through the lens of our own context.
Some people in that theater probably focused on the barefoot kids. Others might have caught the underlying message: the power of sport to connect two entirely distant worlds: the local and the foreign.
The film is the same. But the lessons are different for everyone.
Sitting in the quiet of my house, thousands of miles away from Manhattan, I realized something. I couldn’t control the sound mix. I couldn’t guide the conversation. The film was speaking for itself.
And it was being heard.
