NICE TO SEE YOU AGAIN !

Original title: Nice To See You Again!
Written and directed by: Sergio Mario Illuminato
Cinematography and editing: Sergio Mario Illuminato
Sound design and original score: Roberto Biagiotti
Producer: Sergio Mario Illuminato
Production: Movimento VulnerarTe APS
Post-production: Pyramid Factory
Producer: Gabriele Albanesi
Colorist: Alessandro Ammendola

Country: Italy
Year: 2026
Duration: 52 min
Format: 4K – color
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Audio format: stereo

In the coastal landscape of Augusta, between a former saltworks now a natural oasis and the industrial and military area of the port, the sea is in constant transformation: flamingos, shipwrecks, iron, arsenals, shipyards.

A floating dry dock of the Italian Navy—152 meters long, six thousand tons—sinks under circumstances that have never been clarified. After years underwater, it is acquired through a public procedure by the Noé Shipyard, which decides to attempt its recovery using exclusively its own resources. A deadline is set: 37 days to bring it back to the surface and move it out of the military area.

When GO53 is taken over, the structure is severely compromised: damaged compartments, widespread leaks, unstable volumes, corroded metal. On the seabed, the dock has found a new form of equilibrium. Every intervention required to save it also risks causing its collapse.

The film enters this operation as it happens. No direct interviews, no external explanations. Only bodies, sounds, pressure, waiting.

Underwater, divers work almost without visibility, moving by contact inside a structure that can change behavior at any moment. On the surface, every variation is calculated in real time: weight, pressure, trim, operational sequences that must keep holding while everything is transforming.

When the pumps are activated, GO53 reacts. Water is expelled, the dock rises, stops, gives way. Water returns. Every advance produces new instabilities.

The most critical moment comes when the dock, partially surfaced and structurally fragile, is hooked to be moved out of the military area. The risk of it breaking under its own weight becomes real. From that point on, there is no turning back.

When internal access becomes possible again, the space appears transformed: algae, mollusks, and sediments have occupied the submerged surfaces. The sea has not destroyed. It has inhabited.

Above the resurfaced GO53, flamingos fly past. They do not stop.

The film follows a real-time process in which tension arises from the unstable transformation of a submerged mass and the need to keep it intact while it changes state.

ACT I - IMMERSION

The film opens on a threshold: in the former saltworks of Augusta, water is balance and surface; a short distance away, in the naval military arsenal, it becomes a substance to be controlled. In this passage, GO53 emerges, a 6,000-ton floating dock, invisible beneath the waterline.

The descent of the divers marks the entry into the film. The interior is flooded, deformed, unstable. The dock is no longer a technical structure, but a body adapted to the seabed.

The operational conditions are defined: limited time (37 days), zero margin for error, work with internal resources only.

ACT II - PRESSURE

The recovery unfolds on two simultaneous levels: underwater, divers intervene on the breaches; on the surface, the shipyard prepares and recalibrates each phase in real time.

The activation of the pumps marks the point of no return. The system enters motion: water is expelled, the dock reacts, rises, stops, gives way. New breaches open, water re-enters. Every intervention alters the structure’s equilibrium.

ACT III - EMERGENCE

The climax arrives at the end of the thirty-seventh day. The dock is not yet stabilized, but must be moved anyway. Partially surfaced and structurally vulnerable, GO53 is hooked and placed under tension by a distributed system of chains and tugboats. During the transfer it hits shallow waters. The risk of collapse under its own weight becomes real and irreversible. The system cannot be stopped: it can only hold.

The dock frees itself just enough to cross the boundary of the military zone. Once the critical threshold is passed, it reaches a condition of relative stability. Internal access becomes possible: the structure reveals a profound transformation, colonized by algae, mollusks, and sediments. The sea did not destroy. It inhabited.

The film does not end in triumph. The recovery remains a temporary equilibrium, maintained and always exposed to new possibilities of failure.

NARRATIVE AND TECHNICAL STRUCTURE

The film is shot by a single operator, under conditions of restricted access and real risk.

The camera neither anticipates nor dominates: it moves inside what happens, reaches it when possible, and sometimes misses it. The absence of interviews and closed explanations constructs an observational approach in which tension is not staged but recorded.

The narrative follows a real technical process—restoration of buoyancy, water expulsion, stabilization, and transfer—transforming it into a cinematic progression based on time, pressure, and risk.

I grew up just a few kilometers from where this film was shot. For a long time, I kept my distance, as if moving away were enough to avoid being involved. At a certain point, that distance stopped working.

The encounter with GO53 was not the encounter with a “cinematic subject.” It was the encounter with a real situation that demanded a position: to stay, to look, to move through a process while it was happening. The film comes from here.

When I began following the recovery operation, access was extremely limited. It was not possible to build a traditional crew, to freely plan the shooting, or to multiply viewpoints. I immediately understood that the film would have to accept this condition without correcting it. A single operator. A single camera. No safe position from which to observe.

The operations were constantly changing. Sometimes I managed to reach what was happening; other times I arrived too late. Some images broke off, fogged up, lost orientation. Over time, I understood that this was precisely where the film was taking shape: not in the pursuit of control, but in the impossibility of truly having it.

GO53 was not simply a wreck to be brought back to the surface. On the seabed it had found a new condition of equilibrium. Every intervention required to save it also risked further compromising it. This tension progressively transformed the way of filming as well. The treatment of the image also emerges from this condition: not fully stabilizing what is happening, but preserving its density, pressure, and partial loss of orientation. The camera could not remain external to the process: it shared its instability, its dead time, its waiting, its continuous exposure to risk and error.

For this reason, the film renounces interviews and any explanatory voice. I did not want to build a reassuring distance between the viewer and what was happening. I wanted the audience to enter the physical experience of the operation: the noise of the pumps, the metal deforming, the water returning inside the structure, the divers working almost without visibility. Before understanding, I wanted a bodily perception to emerge.

The editing also emerged from this experience. Not by seeking a linear or demonstrative progression, but by allowing immersion, surface, machine, bodies, and matter to continuously modify one another. Each phase of the recovery opened a new instability.

In the final section, when GO53 returns to the surface, something has irreversibly changed. The interior of the dock appears inhabited: algae, mollusks, and sediments have taken over the space. The sea did not only damage that structure. It transformed it.

For me, the film stops exactly there: at the point where what resurfaces no longer coincides with what it was before.

The film emerges from a time in which invisible infrastructures become suddenly legible precisely because they enter a state of crisis. The recovery of the GO53 is not a technical exception, but the emergence of a broader condition: industrial, military, and environmental systems that have lost stability and must be forced back into an operational form.

“Now” is not a narrative choice, but a real threshold: the moment in which a submerged mass, which has remained in equilibrium on the seabed for years, is reactivated within a cycle of intervention that allows no definitive corrections. The 37-day time frame does not construct suspense, but reveals the fragility of systems that depend on extreme synchronizations between matter, labor, and technical decision-making.

The film is positioned within this temporal fracture: when what had been excluded from visibility returns as an operational problem, and every attempt at control coincides with a risk of loss. In this sense, “now” is the point at which the real can no longer be deferred, because it has already begun to transform.

The film stands at the intersection between cinema of the real and cinema of process, not as a point of contact but as full immersion within a technical operation unfolding in real time. It does not observe from a distance, it does not reconstruct, it does not explain. It exposes itself directly to matter in transformation, reducing mediation to the point where only the pressure of the real remains.

The recovery of the GO53 becomes a stark narrative structure: time, mass, instability. Progression does not follow traditional dramatic construction but the physical response of a system forced beyond its own equilibrium. Every intervention alters the material condition, every gesture produces irreversible consequences, every step forward generates new instability.

The film belongs to a lineage of cinema that operates within real industrial, environmental, and infrastructural processes, where landscape is not a backdrop but an operational field, and the camera does not observe but participates in the same condition of risk as the system being filmed.

In this perspective, the GO53 is not an object to be recovered but a body that has already developed a form of survival on the seabed. Its return is not restoration but enforced rebalancing. It is lifted, destabilized, and reactivated within a cycle that no longer clearly separates rescue from loss. The film remains within this oscillation without resolving it.

The project is positioned as a cinema of the operational limit: it does not represent labor, but moves through the point where labor becomes unstable. It does not explain the process, but returns its direct, temporal, and material perception as an unmediated experience for the viewer.

The film’s production identity emerges as a hybrid structure between documentary cinema, artistic practice, and an intervention embedded within a real, ongoing operation. It does not simply observe the process: it enters it, adopting its constraints, timing, and margins of risk as a formal principle.

Production is minimal and reduced to its core: a single operator, a single camera, no invasive infrastructure. This choice is not stylistic but operational. It stems directly from the conditions of the GO53 recovery and transforms limited access into a productive grammar. The film exists within the friction between technical control and the instability of the real.

On a visual level, the device rejects distance and full image stabilization. The camera does not construct an external viewpoint or a controlling perspective over the field: it enters the process and shares its unstable conditions.

The visual writing is based on three axes: physical proximity to matter (water, metal, pressure), controlled perceptual instability (loss of orientation, shifts in focus, operational discontinuities), and temporal continuity of the real process, without reconstruction or artificial ellipses.

The image does not represent labor: it absorbs its vulnerability.

Sound follows the same logic of adherence. It does not accompany or comment: it records the operational environment in its raw and functional form. Mechanical noise, technical signals, and the physical presence of the shipyard form a sonic dramaturgy that is not illustrative but immersive.

Overall, the film’s production and visual identity can be defined as a cinema of operational exposure: a device that does not observe the process from the outside, but is constituted within it, transforming the instability of the real into cinematic structure.

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.