I remember the moment quite clearly.
A small cultural center in Urduliz.
Not a big cinema. Not a premiere. Just a quiet room with a projection system and a technician helping me load the DCP.
I had reached out to a few places, trying to find somewhere to test the film properly. Eventually, through a local film club in Bilbao, I ended up there. It wasn’t glamorous — but it was enough.
I went with Amaya. Just the two of us.
Up until that point, the film only existed on my computer.
I had watched it dozens of times. On my monitor. With headphones. In silence. In control.
But this was different.
This was the first time the film would exist outside of me.
I wasn’t really nervous about the images.
I knew what they were. I had lived with them for months.
What I was thinking about was the sound.
This was the first time I had worked beyond stereo — building something closer to a cinematic space. Trying to create depth. Direction. Distance. Not just hearing something, but feeling where it comes from.
And there’s no way to truly test that on a laptop.
You can simulate it. You can imagine it.
But you don’t really know… until you sit in a room and let it play.
So we sat down.
Lights off.
And suddenly, the film was no longer mine in the same way.
It was there.
What surprised me wasn’t a specific shot or sequence.
It was the feeling.
That sense of being transported somewhere else.
That maybe — just maybe — the film had enough weight to take you out of the room and into Bali.
Not perfectly. Not completely.
But enough.
And then the ending.
Black screen.
For Xavi.
Seeing that in a cinema hit differently.
It wasn’t just a line anymore.
It had space. It had silence around it. It had time.
When the film ended, I didn’t feel relief.
I felt something closer to… readiness.
Like the film had crossed a line.
From something I was making
to something that could be experienced.
I didn’t change anything after that screening.
Technically, it worked.
Narratively, it held.
But more importantly, it gave me something I hadn’t had before:
A sense that the film could live outside of me.
Before the festivals, before the audience, before everything else, there was just this room.
And that was enough to know it was ready.
