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LEAVING VENEZIA

LEAVING VENEZIA (VIA DA VENEZIA)

By Stefano VENERUSO

Romance - Development 2023

Venice continues to sink and becomes more unlivable every day. Thomas, an American relocated in Italy for more than forty years, together with his adopted grandson who has just arrived from Niger, devises a daring protest to save his city and family home, becoming, despite himself, a little hero.

- Year of production
- 2023
- Genres
- Romance, Drama
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ENGLISH-UNITED STATES
- Budget
- 3 - 5 M$
- Director(s)
- Stefano VENERUSO
- Writer(s)
- Anna PAVIGNANO
- Producer(s)
- Barbara DI MATTIA (30Miles Film Srl)
- Synopsis
- Thomas, a Californian man, no longer young but still handsome, is tied with a heavy chain to the railings of a house in Venice, his feet are soaking in the high water of a city increasingly flooded by the sea.
  Not far from him a bedsheet is fluttering with the writing: "If Venice has to die, I will die with it". Some people, in wader boots and rowboats, try to convince him to get off the improvised scaffold, but Thomas pays them no attention, instead he speaks into a megaphone, giving an impromptu talkfest, alternating between a forty-year story of his life spent in tragic but realistic predictions of an entire world that will be submerged by water, as is happening to Venice, if humanity do not hurry to change their life habits.
  Local televisions arrive, journalists, onlookers, tourists and the man becomes a "hero almost by chance".
  Thomas comes from a place near San Francisco, Benicia, a name that has a strange resonance with Venice.
  He is over sixty and he arrived in Venice as a tourist at the age of twenty-five, fell in love with the city and never wanted to leave. He found love in Venice, raised a family, worked: first at Harry's bar and then at the Excelsior Hotel, where he even happened to act as a stuntman on a worldly occasion for a Hollywood star, with whom he has a strong resemblance. The problem now is that his son Felix, now an adult and father of an adopted child, a little African boy called Abdul, wants to take the whole family away from Venice, because it has become an impossible city even for the Venetians.
  Thomas's son owns a souvenir shop in Piazza San Marco - the presence of tourists makes it seem a kind of amusement park, the high water that invades the square more and more often and which, according to forecasts scientists, in fifty years time will completely submerge it, make life too difficult for the Venetians.
  
  But Thomas, who has now left America many years ago and has chosen Venice as his homeland, knows that he will no longer have a life far from there and therefore decides to chain himself to his house, so as to never have to leave it, at any cost. Involuntarily he thus becomes the symbol, as one with his beloved city, of an entire humanity that wants to fight not to be overwhelmed by its own inability to manage the relationship with nature and, in particular, with the problem of water on Earth.
  
  All the other characters in the story fit into this symbolism, his wife Ivonne who, although loved, Thomas has betrayed several times; the Fire Eater, passionate lover; Marina, woman of regret; his son Felix, in constant conflict with his grumpy father; the grandson Abdul, who comes from a town in central Africa where there is neither sea nor rain and people are dying of thirst, arrives in Venice, where there is an excess of sea and rain and even creates damage.
  And finally, underground and original protagonist, a particular cutlery collection from Harry's Bar, the leitmotif of all the main events of Thomas's existence.