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Every two years the most important artists, curators, collectors and critics gather in one place to take the temperature of contemporary art.

The 114-year-old Venice Biennale has been described as an arts Olympics with even more drugs and as a cross between a trade fair and the Eurovision Song Contest. But it is also where triumphant shows by artists from Modigliani, Sickert and Picasso to Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Anish Kapoor helped to shape the course of modern art.

So even if this year’s British Pavilion does not go on to win the Golden Lion, its contents have already achieved one notable success by surprising the art world with an entirely new view of its favourite playground.

Inside the building, one of 77 national exhibitions competing for top prize, there is only one artwork: the British artist Steve McQueen’s first film since Hunger, the award-laden IRA prison drama, in 2008.

The 1999 Turner Prize winner’s film for Venice, shown in public for the first time yesterday, is Giardini — named after the gardens in which 30 of the pavilions are located. It depicts in exquisite detail life on the site when the Biennale is not in residence.

Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, said after seeing it that the film “has made the art world look at this place differently”. Like many other visitors to the British Pavilion she needed time to “think about what I’ve seen” but was struck by its “unbelievably sophisticated observation”.

Iwona Blazwick, the director of the newly revamped Whitechapel Gallery on the other side of the capital, agreed. “It’s about all the types of life that are excluded from the official structure but also about the slow time of the seasons as opposed to the fast time of all this. It’s incredibly beautiful.”

McQueen said that the idea for a film about the unnoticed private side of a public place had been “in my back pocket” for five years but he had not known where to locate it until he first came to Venice.“It’s the only place on earth I know of where nationalism and art physically coexist,” he said. “And it’s a garden, of all places.”

He shot the film over ten days in February and March. The world that he captured of feral dogs, piles of rubbish and mysterious encounters with people who do not look anything like gallery owners was a “parallel existence” rather than a contradiction of the world of the Biennale, he said. “I embrace it fully. It’s not a case of challenging it — it’s more of a reflection.”

Not everything in the film is there in real life. McQueen inserted actors and the pack of greyhounds. “I’m an artist not a documentary film-maker,” he said.

The 53rd Biennale opens to the public on Sunday and runs until November 22

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