A side event at the last Cannes Film Festival (scheduled this year in July because of the Covid pandemic) was the annual conference promoted by Green Film Shooting and ECO Prod which focussed on the impact of the newest technologies on set management, on extending the sustainability category to include social issues and on the debate around the various activities of so-called “greenwashing”. In this context, Nevina Satta, Director of the Sardegna Film Commission, and Giovanni Pompili, producer at Kino Produzioni, presented a case study: Dryland by Aga Woszczynska, shot in Sardinia, in Cheremule and Alghero, in September and October 2020, with funding from Regione Sardegna and MiC, and support from Eurimages, PFI - Polish Film Institute and Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission. The film tells the story of a couple holidaying in Southern Italy who witness the death of a man without offering help. The two slowly begin to lose control over their lives: their guilt, initially subconscious and repudiated, begins to creep into their apparently stable relationship.
“The Sardegna Film Commission considers the conference on green issues, organized with our French colleagues at ECO Prod and thanks to the stellar activity of Green Film Shooting directed by Birgit Heidsiek, to be essential and we are happy to be invited again as a ‘European case study’ – said Nevina Satta about the event. – We see it as an opportunity for benchmarking that measures public institutions like ours, regional funds and film commissions, with technological innovation on one hand and the world of producers on the other. We once again stressed the urgency of investing in research so that potential new scientific advances are not out of step with those that the production industry will face and so they are linked to a concept of sustainability that embraces not only the environment but also project organization, the health and safety of the professionals working on these projects, the energy efficiency of offices, cinemas and edit suites. Essentially, establishing a healthy, holistic production ecosystem must become obligatory in both the public and private sectors. Last and not least, we reiterated the criticality of concentrating on content to make green behaviour increasingly normal in the daily life of screen characters, and, above all, ensuring that small and big screens provide space for the numerous heroes committed to safeguarding planet Earth, including the least represented and vulnerable groups in our society”.
Dryland is a case study for the integration of green practices into the production of a film, an issue that the Sardegna Film Commission has championed developing its own protocol, based on T-Green. “Shooting during the first and second waves of Covid meant that we were unable to activate several of the practices that have become common on our sets – explained Giovanni Pompili – no flasks, to avoid the excessive use of plastic bottles, or communal catering to avoid wasting food. However, we worked with a local catering company using compostable products, we avoided generators by hooking up to the electricity grid; we chose our lodgings based on the distance from the set to make the journey shorter and used recycled materials in some scenes; we also reduced the number of heavy vehicles, choosing to use rooms in the town as dressing rooms. Our approach is to have a low environmental impact and a high social impact.”
(Monica Sardelli)