Rome · since 2011
Studio
NACNE is a documentary production company based in Rome. We produce historical, social and creative documentaries, and we work as a video partner for UN agencies, NGOs and institutional organisations.
The company was founded in 2011 by Federico Schiavi and Silvana Costa, carrying on the decade of work begun at the Suttvuess cooperative. Both had already spent ten years in production and post-production for other companies before starting it.
The two halves feed each other more than they look like they should. The years spent on fisheries programmes and food security taught us how a sector actually works, which is what makes the films less naive. And the films taught us how to shoot a person telling the truth, which is what the institutional work is short of.
Alongside the films, the company has run the documentary strand of the Leggere e Scrivere festival in Vibo Valentia since 2017 — programming the screenings, the talks and the retrospectives.
People
Federico Schiavi
Producer, director, editor
Producer, editor and director trained as a historian, active in Italian documentary since the late 1990s. He chaired the Suttvuess cooperative from 2006 to 2014 and founded Nacne with Silvana Costa in 2011.
He has produced more than forty documentaries, selected and awarded at Venice, Torino, Visions du Réel, Cinéma du Réel, Leipzig, Biografilm and Guangzhou, with two David di Donatello nominations and a Globo d'Oro. He was President of Doc/it, the Italian Documentary Association, from 2009 to 2011.
Since 2012 he has also worked as producer, filmmaker and editor for FAO and WFP in Rome. He has taught editing at ACT-Cinecittà and Barbarano CineLab, and on the international masterclasses led by Abbas Kiarostami and Babak Payami.
Silvana Costa
Producer, director
Co-founder of Nacne. Director of I Never Went Back, Best Italian Film at Biografilm 2022, and of Be Free, in production.