VULNERARE at Festival of Cinema NYC - Sergio Mario Illuminato's short film

An abandoned 19th-century prison. Empty cells untouched for thirty years. Peeling walls and silence.

A group of international artists steps inside the place no one wants to be-and discovers something unexpected: beauty emerging from pain.

From this experience comes VULNERARE, a short film shot inside the former Pontifical Prison of Velletri, selected to represent Italy at the prestigious Festival of Cinema NYC. The only New York City film festival supported by three major public institutions-the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs-has chosen the film among just five international shorts, alongside works from the USA, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland.

The Velletri prison, built in the 1800s under papal authority and closed in the 1990s, was once destined for demolition. But in 2023, it became a creative laboratory, inhabited by artists, dancers, photographers, and musicians. Six months of living with memory, to return meaning to a forgotten place.

The result is a 13-and-a-half-minute film that resists definition-not merely video art, nor simply experimental cinema. It is a visual and emotional experience, which director Sergio Mario Illuminato calls a "Cinema of the Threshold"-where nothing is scripted and everything arises from the relationship between presence and place. The choreography by Compagnia Atacama (Patrizia Cavola - Ivan Truol), Camilla Perugini and Nicholas Baffoni dancer, cinematography by Federico Marchi - Roberto Biagiotti, and music-sound design by Andrea Moscianese - Davide Palmiotto create a poetic, immersive, raw, and spiritual narrative.

VULNERARE ends with a message scrawled on a wall:
"Vulnerable, therefore alive. Art is loving reality."
A Morse code message-IOSONOVULNERABILE ("I am vulnerable")-is hidden in the soundscape.

While Illuminato is already preparing his first feature film, "THE BASALT THRESHOLD" set to be shot in 2026 on the island of Pantelleria, VULNERARE is meanwhile carrying the voice of an Italy unafraid of fragility-an Italy that transforms it into beauty.

📍 Details
August 3, 2025
CINEMA REGAL - United Artist Midway Stadium 9
108-22 Queens Blvd, Forest Hills, NY 11375

Available: backstage video materials, high-resolution images, interviews with director and artistic cast. MEDIA-KIT Link

Movimento VulnerarTe APS
Via Pasquale Villari, 23, 00184 Roma, Italy
Roberta Melasecca
Communication Manager

The Movimento VulnerarTe APS is a nonprofit Social Promotion Association that believes contemporary art has become irrelevant due to its detachment from the truth of reality. To reclaim its right to life, art must undergo a radical transformation.

Sergio Mario Illuminato is a transdisciplinary artist born in Catania and currently based in Rome, with significant educational and professional experience in London and New York. His deliberate crossing of artistic languages-from visual arts to cinema, philosophy to theater, writing to curatorship-is not merely a sum of skills but a critical and political act: resisting cultural and disciplinary conformity and inhabiting the threshold as a form of existence and inquiry. For Illuminato, language is not an abstract code but a living body-word, sound, gesture, image, relationship-interweaving literary, philosophical, artistic, and audiovisual training in a search for embodiment. Each expressive medium becomes a threshold where the visible and invisible meet and transform, enabling authentic presence and connection. His practice exists "in between": disciplines, knowledge forms, institutions and margins, word and flesh. As artist, author, curator, journalist, director, and theorist, Illuminato embraces this liminal condition as foundational, nourished by crossings and contaminations. Civic commitment is deeply entwined with his aesthetics. Vulnerability, central to his work, is an ethics of encounter and an aesthetic of truth, not weakness. From the VulnerarTe magazine and movement to film and TV works addressing memory, justice, and environment, his output reflects a politics of responsibility and openness to the Other. The body-fragile yet politically and perceptually powerful-is the radiant center of his research. Vulnerability is not just a theme but an ontological posture toward the world, opening spaces of meaning in the present time. Educated with degrees in Literature and Philosophy (Sapienza University, Rome), Painting and Sculpture, and Cinema and Performing Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome), and a certified Master in Contemporary Art from MoMA, New York, Illuminato is also a registered journalist. He directed communications for the UN Environment Programme in the Mediterranean and curated cultural projects linking language, perception, and ecological awareness. As curator, he has organized exhibitions in prestigious venues in Italy and abroad, including the former Pontifical Prison of Velletri and the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris. Key projects include Iosonovulnerabile and Intorno al Futurismo. As author, he published essays and books such as Iosonovulnerabile and Corpus et Vulnus. His artistic exhibitions span Italy, France, the UK, Russia, Latvia, and the UAE, supported by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In cinema, he directed the short film Vulnerare (premiered at Festival of Cinema NYC), Corpus et Vulnus, the documentary Mediterranea, and official videos for the UN and Italian government. In television, he created programs for RAI including Il Festival delle Azalee and Giù la Maschera. In scena contro la Mafia. His theatrical roots include collaboration with Maurizio Scaparro at Teatro Stabile di Roma. Through his work, Sergio Illuminato offers a radical, sensitive vision of the present: inhabiting vulnerability as an existential condition, reflecting on body and memory, and opening spaces for authentic relationship and poetic resistance in an increasingly fragmented world.

This release was published on openPR.