Venice is a beauty parlour in Zagreb, a giant mall in Istanbul,  a Romanian village with more sheep than people, a waterway in the periphery of Berlin…Personal stories told by a handful of characters around the world who have never set foot in Venice, but who all have intimate ties with the city.
Venice elsewhere is a trip into the fantasy that has been created around one of the most famous cities in the world.  Tassilo is the only inhabitant of Neu Venedig, a waterway in the periphery of Berlin, and the Cold War prevented him from ever visiting ‘the Italian Venice’.  A young Turkish couple who are about to get married and dream of a honeymoon in Venice find a fake version of it at an Istanbul shopping mall. Bärbel and Nikola keep busy by creating masks and costumes for a Venetian Carnival in the south of Germany.  A shepherd and a butcher consider themselves real Venetians, however, theirs is not the lagoon city but a village of the same name in the heart of Transylvania. Having escaped from the war in Bosnia, Marica has found work on the city outskirts in a container set up as the beauty salon “Venezia”.

Venice elsewhere questions the imaginary, a group of stories that are quite unrelated to the real Venice, a narration suspended between its exceptional floods and a human desert of contagion.  A voyage to discover how its roots are not simply far away, but are indeed elsewhere.

director: Elia Romanelli

locations: Neu Venedig (Germany), Schwaebisch Hall (Germany), Venetja (Romania), Istanbul (Turkey), Zagreb Croatia)

year: 2021

lenght: 65′

Credits

written by Elia Romanelli, in collaboration with Adolfo Conti

produced by Doc Art and Elia Romanelli

executive producer: Amalia Carandini

producer: Ilaria Sbarigia

cinematography: Giuseppe Drago

editing: Lizi Gelber

editing assistant: Lisa di Gianuario

sound mix: Marta Billingsley

post-production: Vincenzo Marinese

production managers: Giulia Bei (Istanbul), Silvia Cateluta Manole (Venetja), Elena Fontanari (Berlin), Una Elena Pia Langer (Schwaebisch Hall), Giulia Mattiolo (Venezia), Natasa Radovic (Zagreb)

narrator: Giuseppe Cederna

with: Marica Antunović, Andrija Antunović, Maria Boboia, Tassilo Borchardt, Aurel Butum, Gheorghe Aurel Butum, Ecem Duman, Bärbel Gnirke, Gökay Şık, Ionuţ Şerban, Nikola Weller