Sotto le nuvole

As unconventional a city portrait as Gianfranco Rosi gave to Rome in SACRO GRA (2013), SOTTO LE NUVOLE takes daily life under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius as its subject. Rosi spent three years shooting alternately majestic and intimate black-and-white footage in a Naples suspended in time, whose citizens live below an active volcano, with all the precarity that implies. Eschewing garbage, pizza and the Camorra, Rosi weaves together multiple strands including an emergency call centre, a Japanese-run archeological dig, Syrian ship workers transporting grain from Ukraine and employees of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli rummaging through antiquities in a cluttered basement. It’s a place that was, of course, made famous in Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece VIAGGIO IN ITALIA (1954)—the Pompeii scene of which plays just for us in an abandoned cinema, another of the countless Neapolitan ruins. The present, past and potential future of Naples come across in every shot of Rosi’s magical work, as every person, place or thing impels him to go deeper and discover the invisible, what typically exists offscreen—to go not just below the clouds, but also below the earth, and even under the sea for one final aquatic serenade. (Mark Peranson)

Gianfranco Rosi: BOATMAN (1993), BELOW SEA LEVEL (2008), EL SICARIO: ROOM 164 (2010), SACRO GRA (2013), FUOCOAMMARE (2016), NOTTURNO (2020), IN VIAGGIO (2022)