The lights went down on Friday and nobody breathed for two hours. Harbor of Thieves premiered to a full house — every red seat taken, the balcony lined three deep — and I stood at the back with the director, holding a programme I had folded and unfolded a hundred times.
There is a particular silence that only belongs to premieres: two hundred strangers agreeing, without discussion, to care about the same invented woman at the same time. Nadia got that silence. When the harbor fog rolled across the screen in the second act, someone in row five gasped, and the whole room laughed with relief.
Afterwards came the lobby crush — old collaborators, new faces, three separate people asking about the trawler sequence. (Yes, that was really me on deck. No, I will not be taking up sailing.) The film travels to three more festivals this spring, and a wider release follows in the autumn.
Thank you to everyone who queued, who stayed for the Q&A, and who told me afterwards which scene they will argue about on the way home. That argument is the whole point.
