The first thing visitors notice at Estúdios Maré Alta is the noise, or rather its absence. The complex occupies a former shipyard on the south bank of the Tagus, and its six soundstages were built inside the old dry docks, their concrete walls so thick that a jet passing overhead registers as little more than a rumour. On a Tuesday morning in June, three productions are shooting at once, and the loudest thing on the lot is a flock of gulls arguing over a catering van.
Maré Alta opened in 2019 with modest ambitions and a single stage. It now employs more than four hundred people year-round, a figure that sounds unremarkable until you learn that most of them are on permanent contracts. In an industry that runs almost entirely on freelance labour assembled and dissolved project by project, the studio has done something that feels at once radical and antique: it has hired a standing company of craftspeople and kept them.
The architect of that model is Henrique Salgueiro, a former line producer who spent fifteen years watching productions lose weeks to crews who had never worked together. His pitch to investors was simple. Keep the carpenters, gaffers, costumers and editors on salary, give them a permanent home and a pension, and sell productions the one thing they cannot buy elsewhere: a team that already knows how to finish a film on time. The investors were sceptical. The waiting list for stage space now runs to 2028.
A studio system, without the tyranny
Salgueiro bristles at comparisons with Hollywood's golden age, when studios owned their stars and their stars' private lives. Maré Alta does not sign actors, and it does not control what gets made. Productions arrive from Paris, Seoul, São Paulo and Los Angeles with their own directors and their own money. What they rent is not just the space but the institutional memory: a props department that has built nine Victorian drawing rooms and can do a tenth in four days.
Freelancing was sold to us as freedom. Mostly it meant everyone was a stranger on the first day of every job. We wanted a place where people could get good at working together.
The effect on the work is harder to quantify but easy to hear about. Directors who have shot there speak of fewer reshoots and calmer sets. The studio's in-house writers' room, a salaried group of eight who develop original projects and doctor scripts for visiting productions, has produced two series now in their second seasons. The head of the costume department, Luísa Arantes, runs a training programme that takes twenty apprentices a year, most of them from the neighbouring towns.
There are critics. Some producers argue that the model only works because Portuguese labour costs remain lower than those in London or Paris, and that the pensions will become unaffordable in a downturn. Unions elsewhere in Europe have watched with a mix of admiration and wariness. Salgueiro concedes the risks, but points out that the studio has not lost a single department head since opening, and that retention, in the end, is the cheapest efficiency there is.
Late in the afternoon, a crew strikes a set on Stage Four: a 1970s Tokyo apartment built for a Korean thriller. Within an hour the walls are stacked, labelled and wheeled into a warehouse that holds dozens more. Nothing is thrown away. A carpenter named Rui, who has worked there since the first stage opened, points to a door frame that has appeared in five different films. He says he recognises it every time, even when nobody else does.
