Stefan Sardo is, quite literally, a child of Slow Food: his parents helped found the movement, and his father later became director of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. The ideas of the world’s largest movement dedicated to preserving biodiversity and traditional food products are deeply embedded in most of Stefan’s projects—sometimes as central themes, sometimes as passing thoughts expressed by characters in his screenplays.

It was their collaboration on the documentary Slow Food Story that marked the beginning of a long and fruitful exchange of ideas between the Yugoslav producer and the Italian screenwriter and director. It is therefore only natural that ecological principles are woven into the foundations of Nightswim—not only as the basis for an ethical and sustainable business, but also as a laboratory in which we test the applicability of the ideas with which we hope to inspire the entire industry.

We apply our sustainability and environmental protection policy both in our daily office work and on the sets of our films, music videos and television series.

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Everyday Sustainability

In our daily work, we apply ecological standards to transport, waste, energy and food.

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Transport

All our employees commute by public transport, bicycle or on foot. When selecting new collaborators, we give priority to those who can reach the workplace from home in the same ways.

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Waste

At Nightswim’s offices, we follow the separate-waste-collection policy prescribed by the Municipality of Rome. We also strive to minimise the use of plastic by ordering water in glass bottles and using coffee beans rather than plastic pods.

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Energy

All the light bulbs in our offices are energy-efficient LEDs. To reduce energy consumption for cooling in summer and heating in winter, we have introduced remote working on Mondays and Fridays.

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Food

Inspired by the ideas of Slow Food, we see food as an expression of local culture and lifestyle. We are particularly attentive to how food is produced and distributed; we therefore choose locally grown, ecologically produced food, which we prepare in our small kitchen.

Sharing a meal is an important part of our company culture: it expresses conviviality, the pleasure of food and a sense of community. It also gives employees an opportunity to get to know one another better and discuss subjects not necessarily related to work.

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Sustainability on Set

On our sets, we follow the green protocol of Trentino Film Commission, to whose improvement we have actively contributed. We support the introduction of a single European green protocol for the audiovisual industry. This protocol should be flexible and take into account the differences between filming in cities and in uninhabited areas.

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Tree Cinema

We believe that the film industry, with its considerable financial and communicative potential, can do much more to promote sustainability and mitigate the climate crisis. The film industry cannot think about the planet only while filming.

For this reason, we launched a project to create Miyawaki-method urban microforests in the places where films have been shot. Our initiative, called Tree Cinema, aims to involve all production companies in Italy and to change the paradigm of greenhouse-gas emissions offsetting.

Until now, offsetting has generally involved purchasing international credits to finance reforestation and environmental-protection projects around the world. We believe that film productions should leave something tangible in the territories where they have worked and filmed.

In this way, citizens, partners and film audiences can see what a specific production has done for the environment, while the benefits of each microforest can be enjoyed by the residents of the neighbourhood where it was created.