Below the Clouds

With his most striking and eloquent documentary yet, Italian master Gianfranco Rosi has crafted a modern masterpiece—a visionary portrait of a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius near the volcanic caldera, which today experiences frequent tremors. 

In his visually extraordinary, wide-ranging look at the area, Rosi observes archaeologists reckoning with ancient artifacts and the wreckage of plunderers, modern diggers descending into abandoned tunnels, children happily attending a storefront school, and phone banks fielding late-night calls from anxious locals still mindful of the eruption that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D.

Elegantly linking modern and ancient life, Below the Clouds connects to our contemporary moment—a contemplation of the unimaginable tucked inside our daily lives. 

Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival. In Italian, Arabic-Syrian, Japanese, Neapolitan Dialect, and English with English subtitles.

“Superb and brilliantly composed. An utterly distinctive, luminous cinematic mosaic.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian