BELOW THE CLOUDS

[SOTTO LE NUVOLE]
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, documentary master Gianfrano Rosi’s (SACRO GRA, FIRE AT SEA) new film explores the city and surroundings of Naples, Italy, a place where thousands of years of history echo and resonate for its people every day. Dominated by the looming presence of Mount Vesuvius — a still-active volcano, whose eruption in 79 AD buried the nearby city of Pompeii — Neapolitans live in close proximity to the possibility of destruction, with occasional tremors and the tragic ruins of Pompeii as constant reminders. And yet, thousands of years of life and culture have persisted and thrived there. Rosi takes us deep inside the fabric of daily life in this place uniquely formed by its history — literally, in the case of the buried architecture and relics found beneath the ground in a network of tunnels, which we see visited variously by students, tourists, law enforcement officers, firefighters and archaeologists. The latter note the work of the grave robbers, or tombaroli, who have made off with priceless sculptures and frescos for hundreds of years, and reveal the thousands of fascinating antiquities that have been consigned to storage in Naples’ Archaeological Museum, in a sense remaining undiscovered for most people. Rosi intercuts these scenes with visits to an after-school tutor who gently chides his students, charged with reading Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” to take more interest in their schoolwork; a cargo ship in the port, where expat Syrian crew members deliver Ukrainian grain, only recently liberated from wartime blockade; and emergency line operators, who field calls ranging from domestic assault to tremor reports to a lonely voice simply asking for the correct time — a regular caller and a daily occurrence, the operator reveals. All taken together, Rosi’s mosaic portrait depicts a place where creation and destruction, reverence and desecration, and the past and the present all live side by side. –Todd Hitchcock

Official Selection, 2025 AFI FEST, Venice and Toronto film festivals. DIR/SCR/PROD Gianfranco Rosi; SCR Carmelo Marabello, Marie-Pierre Muller; PROD Paolo Del Brocco, Donatella Palermo. Italy, 2025, b&w, 115 min. In English, Italian, Syrian Arabic, Japanese and Neapolitan with English subtitles. NOT RATED

Run Time: 115 Minutes

Opening Date: Sunday, December 07, 2025

Genre: Documentary

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