You Deserve Spain

Spain would have been easy to find in a Spanish restaurant.

Perhaps too easy.

We were more interested in what might happen if we took away the restaurant and kept everything that makes people want to stay.

So **You Deserve Spain** found its home in a summer cinema in Thessaloniki.

There were rows of seats, but no reason to remain in them. A screen, but plenty happening elsewhere. Open air, June heat and enough freedom for the space to change depending on who walked into it.

Then we gave it clues.

Spanish beer buried in ice. Food travelling through the crowd on large trays. Straw hats under the sun. Fans opening and closing between conversations. Red and yellow stretching into a much less predictable spectrum.

And languages.

Spanish, Greek, English somewhere in between, sentences occasionally assembled from all three. People who had never met finding reasons to speak to each other, then appearing in the same photographs a little later.

That mattered more than recreating Spain perfectly ever could. Because places are not made only from what they look like. They are made from what people do once they feel comfortable inside them.

The cinema gave us exactly that freedom. A familiar structure with its usual rules loosened just enough. The seats stopped deciding where people belonged. Food gave them reasons to move. Beer gave them reasons to stay. Everything else was allowed to happen in between.

Which is perhaps why the most cinematic part of the afternoon never made it onto the screen.

It was happening in front of it.