Rocco
Directors: Summayya Wagenseil and Lucia Buricelli
United States, 2025, 5 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2025
Category:Experimental
Genres:Comedy, Drama, Romance, Animation
WINNER: Audience Award
Cast:Rocco Pellone
Crew:Production & Cinematography: Summayya Wagenseil & Lucia Buricelli. Screenplay: Summayya Wagenseil. Photography: Lucia Buricelli. Editing: Summayya Wagenseil. Original Music: Charles Stacy.
Email:swagenseil@gmail.com
Synopsis
In the hustle of New York City, Rocco feels small, lonely and alienated. He harbors a big heart and an even bigger dream of finding true love. Will he ever find it? Wandering the maze of the big city, he discovers the importance of being true to oneself and the beauty of fleeting moments.
Trailer
About the directors
Summayya Wagenseil - Summayya Wagenseil is a filmmaker based in New York City. She began her professional journey working in communications and art institutions, igniting her passion for storytelling across various mediums. As an American filmmaker with a rich multi-racial and cultural background, her work seeks to explore and reclaim Americana tropes and locations in novel, untold ways. Her films delve into themes of community, identity, and displacement, connecting diverse audiences with timeless, transnational narratives. Her directorial debut, 'If You Don’t Love Me, Set Me Free', won the “Best Experimental Short” award at the Manhattan Film Festival in 2023. Rocco is her second film.
Lucia Buricelli - Lucia Buricelli is a photographer born and raised in Venice, Italy, currently living in New York City. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for urban environments, Lucia’s work captures the essence of daily life through a unique blend of street photography and documentary storytelling. Her distinctive use of frontal flash and vibrant color palettes brings an immediate, almost dramatic quality to her images, highlighting the often-overlooked details of everyday scenes. Her images offer a compelling exploration of human behavior and the intricate interactions within urban settings. Lucia creates narratives that reveal the subtle complexities of modern life. Her work has been published in the New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Vogue, Buzzfeed, Wall Street Journal and more. Rocco is her first film.
Filmmakers' note
In Rocco, we explore the timeless theme of urban loneliness through an absurd and whimsical lens. A screenplay born from the real-life complexities of alienation, loneliness, and rejection, the film delves into the difficulty of finding one's place in New York City - a place both teeming with life and rife with isolation. The cockroach, Rocco, embodies the misunderstood misfit, navigating a labyrinth cityscape that mirrors the emotional maze many face in their search for love and belonging.
The hustle and bustle of cities often leaves you feeling unseen and unheard. Through Rocco's journey, we aim to highlight the absurdity of this condition and the fleeting yet profound moments that punctuate our lives. The butterfly companion symbolizes the ephemeral nature of love and the hope that, despite setbacks, anything is possible to achieve. We hope Rocco resonates with audiences by shedding light on the universal struggle to find one's place and the beauty of fleeting moments that make difficult journeys worthwhile.
As two artists with varied creative pursuits, we have seen the cityscape change with social media, gentrification, and the commodification of art, photography and film. We have felt the loss of appetite for true authenticity in New York City, whose creative world was once born out of authentic artists and misfits. This film is a celebration of staying true to yourself and an ode to the absurd.