Production diary · 2023 — 2026
Scroll maps the sequence
Write it small enough to finish
Inês Varela wrote eleven drafts in the back office of the salt works her grandfather ran. Each draft lost a location, a character or a night shoot, until the whole story fit inside one season on the lagoon and a budget a cinema co-op could believe.
Draft 11 · 102 pages · 3 locations
Ask the cinemas first
Instead of chasing a sales agent, we pitched the people who would actually show it. Fourteen independent cinemas pre-bought screenings, a regional fund matched them, and 312 strangers covered the rest in small, stubborn amounts.
€184,000 raised · no private equity
Twenty-three days, thirty-eight rolls
We shot on 16mm because the salt reflects everything and film forgives it. One camera, a crew of nine, no lights after the first week — the flats did the bouncing. Every exposed roll went to the lab on the 18:05 bus.
16mm · 11 h of rushes · 1.66 : 1
Lose the scene everyone loved
Fourteen weeks in a rented flat above a laundrette. The first assembly ran two hours forty-one. The version that works is ninety-four minutes and opens on the shot we nearly threw away: the salt rake at dawn, with nobody holding it.
Assembly 161 min → final 94 min
Premiere where the audience argues
The Salt Year opened Tidewater, a small festival of fiction made by documentary crews — a late slot, a hundred and twenty seats and forty minutes of questions afterwards. Two distributors called the next morning. We kept our territories.
World premiere · 3 sold-out screenings
Thirty-eight screens, one at a time
No wide release. The film travels print by print through the cinemas that paid for it first, with Inês or the cinematographer in the room on opening night. It reaches its thirty-eighth screen in March.
38 cinemas · 6 countries · a Q&A at every opening