VULNERARE

Vulnerare, by Sergio Mario Illuminato, is not a conventional short film, nor does it aim to be one. It positions itself in a boundary zone between cinema and performance, closer to meditation than to narrative. Set in an abandoned prison, it does not invite the viewer to follow a storyline, but to reconstruct one. Clues are scattered like fragments: the textures of stone and rust, the echo of distant footsteps, the ghost of lives once confined within these spaces.

Illuminato adopts an impressionistic language. A wall, a barred window, a corridor: each element is presented to the gaze with such tactile attention that it seems possible to feel its roughness under the fingers. Contemporary dancers move through the spaces like spectral presences: their bodies evoke prisoners, or time itself, flowing and dissolving. The prison is no longer a place, but an embodied memory.

The visual research is often striking: Illuminato demonstrates a precise sensitivity to materials, surfaces, and framing composition. At times, however, certain technical elements emerge that interrupt full immersion, drawing attention back to the filmic device itself. This tension becomes part of the work’s reflection on the limits of the image.

The editing guides the viewer through fragments that never resolve into a single narrative structure, but remain open to perceptual reconstruction. It is a device that demands active participation, a continuous recomposition between what is seen and what is inferred. Sound plays a decisive role: through a calibrated use of J and L cuts, it creates continuity between discontinuous spaces, transforming visual fracture into sensory flow.

Vulnerare does not aim to explain, but to immerse. It is a perceptual experience unfolding within a space dense with traces and stratifications, where memory is not reconstructed but evoked. Imperfections are not concealed: they become part of the expressive structure of the work.

For its ability to combine aesthetic rigor with experimental research, the jury of the Hollywood Best Indie Film Awards 2025 is proud to award Sergio Mario Illuminato the prize for Best Director / Experimental Film. Vulnerare is recognized as a work in which technical limitation and poetic vision coexist, generating a coherent and radical language.

Abandoned in Velletri. For men who build careers and consider their mark on the world, this story offers something worth examining: what happens when creative force meets institutional decay, and how confronting vulnerability becomes an act of leadership.

The Festival of Cinema NYC does not distribute awards lightly. Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, it represents a serious cultural validation. That a prison-born film by director Sergio Mario Illuminato received this recognition suggests that American cultural institutions are acknowledging something profound in its approach to abandoned structures of power.

When Papal Authority Becomes Artistic Canvas

The former Papal Prison of Velletri, 40 kilometers southeast of Rome, embodies institutional power in physical form. Built in the 19th century under papal authority when the Catholic Church governed central Italy, this imposing structure served both as a courthouse and detention center for the Papal States. For over a century, it held prisoners, hosted trials, and embodied the judicial system of a past era.

Closed in the 1990s as Italy modernized its penal system, the building remained empty for three decades. By 2023, facing demolition, it seemed destined for erasure from history. What followed offers a compelling case study in how spaces designed for control and punishment can become laboratories for creative expression.

Similar transformations have occurred across continents. Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary now hosts site-specific installations addressing incarceration and justice. Alcatraz Island attracts over 1.4 million visitors annually to see art exhibitions exploring the prison’s layered history. These spaces share something crucial: they demonstrate how places built to contain and control can become platforms for examining power itself.

Artists Enter the Void

Before demolition could proceed, painters, photographers, dancers, and musicians claimed the Velletri prison as their temporary home. For six months, they inhabited decaying cells and dark corridors, transforming every corner into a creative laboratory. This act of appropriation carries weight: by taking control of a site built for confinement, these artists inverted the building’s original purpose.

The group included choreographers Patrizia Cavola and Ivan Truol of Compagnia Atacama, photographers Federico Marchi and Roberto Biagiotti, and sound designers Andrea Moscianese and Davide Palmiotto. Their collaborative work became both performance and documentation, creating what would become VULNERARE.

This approach to abandoned institutional spaces reflects a broader cultural shift. At Fremantle Prison in Australia, extensive prisoner art spanning 136 years provides insight into lived experience and cultural expression. These examples suggest that creative work in former sites of confinement serves a deeper purpose than spectacle: it redefines how we understand power, memory, and human resilience.

The Film’s Approach: Threshold Cinema

Illuminato’s methodology, which he calls “THRESHOLD CINEMA,” captures authenticity through improvisation and spontaneity. No script, only life unfolding. This approach produces what he defines as “Communicating Artistic Organisms” — living works that shift and transform before the viewer’s eyes.

The film’s visual language moves from black-and-white imagery of the prison’s past to bursts of color representing rebirth. Dancers perform in claustrophobic cells, transforming them into stages of freedom. The soundtrack guides viewers from carceral drama toward creative possibility.

Media historian Bruno di Marino notes that “walls, floors, ceilings become cuts, wounds, openings. Choreographic gestures and painterly matter merge into a single visual score through surgical editing and light interplay.”

Why It Speaks to Men of Influence

Contemporary leadership research increasingly recognizes vulnerability as a central strength rather than a weakness. Leaders who embrace vulnerability build trust, foster authentic connection, and create collaborative environments.

The VULNERARE project embodies this principle in physical form. Illuminato describes the prison as “a contemporary cathedral of vulnerability” where art expresses rebirth. Vulnerability thus becomes an interpretive structure of power.

From Wounds to Beauty

The film closes with words carved into a wall: “Vulnerable therefore I live, art is loving reality.” Hidden in the audio track, a coded message appears in Morse: IAMVULNERABLE. Recognizing vulnerability does not mean weakness, but presence.

As another inscription on the wall reads: “Cuts on the skin are not an illusion, they no longer heal.” Marks become art precisely because they are acknowledged.

VULNERARE carries Italy’s voice into America, showing what happens when wounds become generative possibility. Entering abandoned spaces means restoring voice to what was once removed.

Three levels of representation intertwine in Vulnerare, each of which in turn generates additional layers throughout the film, evoking in the viewer a range of emotions and associations.

The first concerns the location: a disused prison. The setting itself evokes a transversal genre in audiovisual language—the re-staging of dismantled, decaying spaces that recall a recent or distant past and seem saturated with memory, often painful (from Bourbon-era penitentiaries to pre-Basaglia psychiatric hospitals, and even 1980s nightclubs belong to this lineage).

The second level is performative: dance becomes, in certain moments, a means of reclaiming these sites, symbolically restoring life to them.

The third level consists of the insertion of artworks created by the filmmaker himself within the space explored by the camera: abstract paintings placed inside the cells that once held prisoners. These works transform the location into a kind of museum, loading it with additional meanings, while simultaneously being re-signified by the very space in which they are installed, to the point of almost blending into it.

The aim of Vulnerare is to merge visual art, dance, and cinema, with the addition of a highly effective sound design in which music becomes noise and noise becomes music (composed by Andrea Moscianese). It also seeks to construct a possible narrative, supported by the writings of those who lived here for years, confined within these walls; by objects and legal files that evoke a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; by plants growing through concrete, reclaiming what was taken from nature; and finally by all traces and testimonies of a temporal dimension that continues to resonate within the desolate void.

Before the end credits, a caption informs us that the prison we have entered is the Papal Prison of Velletri, but this information adds little to the viewing experience. What remains are the surfaces that Illuminato’s gaze allows us to perceive almost tactually.

Walls, floors, ceilings, doors, and windows become cuts, wounds, faults, and fractures, while choreographic gestures—inscribed within this architectural geometry of full and empty spaces—and painterly matter on canvases, hung or placed against walls amid debris, become movements within a single visual score. This is achieved through handheld camera travellings, dissolves, chiaroscuro effects, light flickers, rapid zooms, close details, and abrupt cuts orchestrated through a surgical editing approach.

Vulnerare can ultimately be read as a single installation. In this sense, the presence of Illuminato himself within one of the courtyards seems to close the circle. The artist’s silhouette, seen from above, fixes a phrase (or perhaps two interconnected phrases?) written on the wall: “Vulnerable therefore I live. Art is loving reality.”

Vulnerability represents a weakness, since human beings can be harmed by other human beings, but it is also a form of strength, as it is the awareness of being alive even in suffering. The artist, too, is vulnerable when confronting reality, immersing himself within it.

The awareness that making art inevitably means loving reality is not always a valid assumption. It is certainly not valid for those artists who, through creation, attempt to escape the dimension in which they live.

But in this case, the task of the artist is to portray the human condition within the carceral universe, and what remains of human dignity even when individuals are deprived of their freedom.

The screening of the short film VULNERARE represents a symbolic moment in the life of the project, which unfolds across multiple sites: IOSONOVULNERABILE began in January through an artist residency in the abandoned spaces of the former Papal prison of Velletri, continued in Paris, and will proceed next December at the seventeenth-century premises of the Historical Museum of Villa Altieri in Rome.

IOSONOVULNERABILE is a complex project in which human vulnerability—along with the fears, defeats, and weaknesses that accompany individuals’ earthly experience—is explored and, in a sense, exorcised and transformed into emotion through multiple artistic forms such as photography, cinema, choreographic art, theatre, music, set design, and publishing.

The importance of the project is highlighted by the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, Antonio Calbi, through the following words: “Culture is an opportunity for formation and growth and at times also a form of struggle against injustice. The first step toward this is accepting our own fragility in a world that continues to demand perfection; we choose to exalt vulnerability, the beauty of the simple, pure gesture.”

VULNERARE: a material short film

Sergio Mario Illuminato’s debut work, running just over 13 minutes, is dense with meaning, largely emerging from the observation of matter itself. Shot inside the former Papal prison of Velletri, built in 1860 and decommissioned in 1991, and now about to be repurposed, the film unfolds as a series of images—both in color and in striking black and white—in which the past is revealed, or rather the echoes of multiple lives (often suffering ones, given the nature of a prison) that were expressed and repressed in these spaces.

Nets, bars, doors, scaffolding, files piled on the floor, writings on the walls, and corridors are the protagonists of the short film, but not only. Intense performative moments emerge through choreographic actions that evoke the corporeality of the human beings who once inhabited these places, as well as shadows recalling sedimented traces of life, bound to a blurred memory that seeps from the peeling walls, where the damaged surface itself becomes meaning.

Matter as expression of reality

During the screening of the audiovisual work, enriched by a “sharp-edged” soundtrack composed by Andrea Moscianese, one has the sensation of recalling deep emotions not only through sight, but also through an almost tactile perception of the images and objects on screen.

Opening those dusty files and reading the names of those who lived in those places under the vulnerability of condemnation fulfills a viewer’s desire. Each name evokes an individual, a story, a marked life, often lost in the silence of a history that preserves victors more than the defeated.

The short film does not indulge in self-referential tendencies nor in exclusionary visual languages, but instead seeks a direct communicative channel with the present, speaking about memory and time, and the places where that memory has been deposited.

Regarding the tactile sensation evoked by the film, one wall inscription is particularly striking: “Cuts on the skin are not an illusion, they do not heal anymore,” which seems to condense the impact of reality on human lives, leaving indelible marks.

Art is loving reality, whatever it may be

The title of the short film derives from the Latin vulnus, meaning wound, injury, harm. In Illuminato’s film these wounds appear irreparable: writings on walls, names in registers, traces that outlast both the duration of punishment and the subject themselves.

This is not only about the past, but about a memory that is still active, presenting itself as living matter. The film invites us not to consider the past as distance, but as an experience to be actualized in the present, assuming vulnerability as an essential condition of our relationship with reality.

In this sense, the artistic gesture becomes an act of exposure: showing one’s wounds, acknowledging one’s fragility, accepting the impossibility of total control.

Within this perspective, the closing reference to the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini is also placed, evoking a world in which failure and renewal are possible without the loss of dignity.

The final message that runs through the entire work follows: “vulnerable therefore I live, art is loving reality.”

The screening of the short film VULNERARE represents a symbolic moment in the life of the project, which unfolds across multiple sites: IOSONOVULNERABILE began in January through an artist residency in the abandoned spaces of the former Papal prison of Velletri, continued in Paris, and will proceed next December at the Historical Museum of Villa Altieri in Rome.

IOSONOVULNERABILE is a complex project in which human vulnerability—together with the fears, defeats, and weaknesses that accompany individuals’ earthly experience—is traversed and transformed through various artistic forms: photography, cinema, choreographic art, theatre, music, scenography, and publishing.

The project is grounded in the idea of exposing fragility as a constitutive condition of reality. Culture thus becomes a space for formation and exchange, in which vulnerability is not removed but assumed as an operative material.

VULNERARE: a material short film

The short film, with a duration of approximately 13 minutes, is constructed through close observation of matter. Shot inside the former Papal prison of Velletri, built in 1860 and decommissioned in 1991, the film works with what remains: surfaces, marks, structures, residues.

Nets, bars, doors, scaffolding, files, writings on the walls, and corridors are not scenic elements, but active presences. Alongside them, performative moments reactivate a bodily memory linked to the spaces, in a continuous oscillation between trace and presence.

Matter is not background but agent. Surfaces do not represent: they react. The image is constructed as direct contact, in which the distance between observer and object is progressively reduced.

During the screening, supported by a soundtrack by Andrea Moscianese, the experience is not limited to vision but extends into a broader perceptual dimension, almost tactile in nature.

Opening the files and reading the names inscribed in the documents introduces a direct relationship with the lives that passed through those spaces. Each name refers to a concrete presence, to an interrupted or suspended biography.

The film does not construct a linear narrative, but rather a field of tensions between time and matter, in which memory is not reconstruction but active persistence.

In this perspective, writing on the walls, marks, engravings, and traces become structural elements of the work—not clues, but components of the present.

Matter as a condition of the real

The work develops as an inquiry into the relationship between body, space, and time. The images do not illustrate, but expose states of continuous transformation, in which what is observed is never separated from what observes.

Vulnerability is not thematized, but enacted as a condition of the filmic device. It is what emerges when form is not yet stabilized and remains exposed to variation.

The title refers to the Latin vulnus, wound, understood not as a completed event but as a persistent state. In the film, wounds are not closed: they remain active, as traces that continue to produce meaning.

The artistic gesture is configured as a controlled exposure to this instability. Not a representation of fragility, but an immersion in its dynamics.

What emerges is an idea of art as a practice of relation to reality, in which vulnerability becomes not a lack but a form of knowledge.

The conclusion of the work is condensed into an essential formula: “vulnerable therefore I live, art is loving reality.”

The film Vulnerare has been awarded the JURY PRIZE FOR EXPERIMENTAL FILMS with the following motivation:

The film transforms a space filled with memory and absence into a place of reflection on the profound relationship between art and vulnerability. Set in a former prison, where time seems to have crystallized among inscriptions carved by inmates and files forgotten under dust, the film builds a dense and evocative narrative, capable of interweaving individual and collective memory. With sensitivity and rigour, the work highlights how beauty and the power of creation can emerge even from the most painful and tragic experiences of existence, restoring to art its capacity to hold wounds, give shape to fragility, and generate new possibilities of meaning. An intense and deeply evocative film, which invites us to recognise in vulnerability an essential dimension of human experience and artistic practice.