“…I think of a thousand cities like this, of hundreds of thousands of lighted places where at this hour people allow the evenings darkness to descend and have none of the thoughts in their head that I have in mine.” – Italo Calvino

I still very clearly remember the first time I encountered a Car Phone. My grandfather picked me up for the weekend in his Ford Ranger. When I entered the vehicle he began to show off this corded phone like one today would show off the many features of their “smart-phone” before inwardly collapsing into said device. Nowadays, every month brings something else that expands or simplifies our ability to get things done faster, with more efficiency, while we tend to ignore the socially distancing ramifications. With each new technological progression we slavishly become unsure of how we were able to conduct our lives before…

Social networking, for example, has taken this trend even further – relegating our relationships to an online commodity – where one editorializes their life for an audience to receive them in the way they want to be seen. This acceptable and streamlined form of voyeurism has made it socially acceptable to leave the blinds open 24/7 – to peep when you like with no consequence or residual affect.

That being said Venice is a film about consequence and residual affect, the story of a man, who comes home for the holidays, after a long period of absence, and finds himself, out of boredom and nostalgia, breaking into the homes of girls he used to like.

An analogy I like to draw in regards to the underlying subtext of what Venice is about is this; if social networking is soft-core pornography, than what Frederick Sound does in Venice is hard-core. There is no restraint other than what he imposes on himself and the act of breaking into homes gives him an unfiltered ability to reconnect with his past. The idea that peering into a window that someone leaves open with the intentionality of the world to see does not reveal any deeper truth, it merely encapsulates our vulnerable need to connect in an age so lacking in genuine interaction, that we will lay ourselves bare, without truly letting anyone in. For me, the passage above reflects this duality. That our expanding technologies, which have closed so many gaps in our ability to communicate, have somehow made us feel all the more alone. 

Venice is a film in reaction to a disappointment in options. It’s a film by a filmgoer, for filmgoers made with the intention of reestablishing artfulness and depth of experience without sacrificing what truly makes a film entertaining – involvement. Entertainment should not be a pejorative term but it has evolved into one in lieu of the recycling of old ideas and packaging them as new. This pandering has rendered a distinctive set of the film going public disenchanted and the rare moment when a film is allowed to be both as artful as it is entertaining, it almost always connects with audiences in a more lasting way.

A perfect example of this and a film that so succinctly embodies a generational malaise is Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, a film that is not only near perfect in every respect, but also remains as timeless as it is vibrant. The reason for this partly lies in the films ability to not date itself by miring in its setting, pushing the generational context into a subtext to tell a story about anyone who just feels stuck, or like Frederick Sound in Venice, who wants to feel connected to a world that is growing away from him.

The aim of Venice is to be a film about a generation for generations to come but also to subvert your expectations. I strive and hope for nothing more than to leave an indelible mark on film and to hopefully raise a bar or two in the process because whether it’s the plastics of The Graduate or the car phones of our youth, the technological advancements of our times do not define the human condition, we do. And with all that being said, Venice is somehow a romantic comedy.

--Phil Donohue