You Are Venice
2019 · 7m · United Kingdom
Directed by Sergio Marquez
Genres: documentary, essay film, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
Built from found YouTube footage, this documentary uses Venice's transformation into an 'absolute fake' tourist city as a metaphor for humanity's dangerous fascination with destruction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Found-footage essay films are a dime a dozen, but Marquez actually commits to the bit—Venice-as-metaphor-for-late-capitalism could've been toothless, instead it's genuinely unsettling in how it lets the footage speak its own contradictions.
A formally rigorous work that inherits the essayistic tradition of Harun Farocki while engaging with the archive-as-argument method; the restraint in not over-narrating the found material demonstrates real curatorial intelligence about how meaning accrues through juxtaposition.
The decision to let YouTube's own compression artifacts and video quality degradation become part of the texture—rather than restoring or unifying the source material—turns a budget constraint into the film's entire thesis about authenticity and decay.
Reviews
There's a seriously unapologetic and candidly blunt air of thinly veiled animosity towards tourists and intentionally satirical bite to be found in this 7-minute documentary short from director Sergio Marquez that recently screened during the 2nd Annual 2019 Berlin Illambra Experimental Film Festiva