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Written, directed and edited by Sergio Mario Illuminato
Director of Photography and Camera Operators Federico Marchi and Roberto Biagiotti
Original Music by Andrea Moscianese
Sound Design by Davide Palmiotto
Post-Production Facility Pyramid Factory
Colorist Alessandro Ammendola
RUNNING TIME: 41' – FORMAT: 4K, 16:9 aspect ratio
This 40-minute experimental film enters the operational core of iosonovulnerabile. It does not represent it. It inhabits it. There is no sequence. There is a field. A continuous flow of macro images in which scale collapses and matter becomes landscape. Surfaces open up. Thicken. Give way. Nothing remains still long enough to be named. The works react. Absorb. Record. Transform. They are “Artistic-Communicating Organisms.” Light, humidity, time, contact: they are not a backdrop. They intervene. They leave marks. They shift balances. The artwork is not a result. It is an exposed process. A body under pressure. The camera does not observe. It enters. It stays close to things until they can be felt. Detail does not describe: it implicates. What appears is not a completed form, but formation. Not an image, but emergence.
Over the course of the film, something accumulates. A tension that never resolves: between control and loss, structure and erosion, presence and disappearance. The organisms attempt to stabilize themselves and immediately slip away. Here vulnerability is not a theme. It is a condition that takes place. In matter. In time. Without return.
The experimental film shifts the gaze. No longer art as object, but as a living system. And the viewer does not remain outside: they are implicated. They must move closer. And remain within what continues to become.
Corpus et Vulnus originates from a necessity: to remove the artwork from a position of distance and bring it into a condition of contact. Not to film art, but to enter a system that reacts, that changes state as it is traversed. The choice of macro imagery is not aesthetic. It is a position. It reduces the safety margin of the gaze, eliminates the overall view, and forces us to remain inside the material. At that distance, every surface becomes unstable, every detail is already transformation.
The film rejects a traditional narrative structure. It does not build a progression in order to explain, but allows continuous real time itself to act upon the images. The editing does not organize: it exposes. It keeps variations, micro-mutations, and drifts open.
The “Artistic-Communicating Organisms” are not metaphors. They are real devices, sensitive to environmental conditions. Light, humidity, temperature, human contact: every variation alters their behavior. The film does not document this process; it is part of it. The presence of the camera is already an intervention.
Sound operates in the same way. It does not accompany or comment. It records frictions, densities, and interruptions. It creates a perceptual threshold that draws the viewer closer, bringing them into an almost tactile mode of experience.
Vulnerability is not treated as a theme. It is not declared. It is something that happens when a system can no longer maintain its initial balance. When it exposes itself, when it absorbs, when it allows itself to be altered. This film attempts to remain at that point: where form has not yet stabilized and can no longer return to what it was before.
In the work of Sergio Mario Illuminato, the body is never separate from the way the world passes through it, modifies it, exposes it. Cinema, visual arts, and media research have converged for years in a practice that investigates the zones in which control, vulnerability, and perception enter into tension.
In cinema and audiovisual work he writes and directs documentaries, art films, and experimental works presented in international and institutional contexts. Among his most recent works, Vulnerare (2023) was presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris and awarded at several international festivals, including the Tokyo International Film Festival, the New York City International Film Festival, and the Los Angeles CineFest. Among earlier projects: Mediterranea (2010), produced within the framework of the United Nations Environment Programme for the Mediterranean (UNEP/MAP), Corpus et Vulnus (2023) and Intorno al Futurismo (2000).
In parallel he has developed a path in the visual arts and curatorship, collaborating with Italian and international cultural institutions including MAXXI, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Fondazione Memmo, and the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris. He has also worked in television with RAI and served as Director of the Information and Communication Centre for the United Nations Environment Programme for the Mediterranean (UNEP/MAP).
His training spans cinema, visual arts, and philosophical studies between Rome and New York, with studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Università La Sapienza, ANICA Academy, the New York Film Festival, and MoMA in New York.
The Basalt Threshold arises from a research path developed across documentary, experimental cinema, and contemporary media. It is the author's first narrative feature film because it is the first project that required a narrative form capable of holding together body, relationship, and systems of control within a fully embodied cinematic experience.
May 27 – June 30, 2026, ROME, ITALYOfficial Selection in Competition, 7th Edition
Festival del Tempo
Experimental Film Section
copyright 2023 Sergio Mario Illuminato all rights reserved. Sergio Mario Illuminato pursuant to Article 45 of copyright law (Law 22 April 1941 no. 633 and subsequent amendments)