In Venice, a community comes together to make wine so as to take care of an increasingly fragile environment, but during the course of the year bureaucratic hold ups, climatic events and other problems put everything at risk, even its own existence.

“The Venetian Year” follows a year in the life of Laguna nel Bicchiere, a cultural association whose aim is to safeguard the abandoned vineyards in the Venice lagoon. The story begins as a fable with a group of cheerful and noisy people getting to work on a grape harvest. The stranger gazes in amazement upon the discovery of a secret world of walled vineyards, boat journeys and even a cellar in a 16th century monastery on the island of San Michele, the city’s cemetery.

Yet, as the season continues, it becomes clear that something is not quite right in this bucolic picture; something elusive, less obvious, but much more important. In a city that tends to fragment human relationships and transform all its aspects into exclusive businesses, what is the value in taking care of no longer wanted vines and spaces? Is it a courageous gesture or merely a eutopia? Certainly, these inept volunteers will not save the Venetian lagoon from the risk of abandonment that hangs over anything without economic interest, so what’s the sense in carrying on? And when town council notices, climatic events and other unexpected hitches upset this already precarious balance, everything must be put up for discussion, even the very existence of the association itself.

The year continues, season after season, bringing to the fore traces of personal stories from the choral narrative: the founder who started making wine with the children from the school where he taught, the homeless acrobat, the landlord vintner, the enologist who escaped from a wine-making factory, the researcher who left London to rediscover time for her life. And above all Venice and its lagoon, a continuous presence, both wonderful and suffocating.