Below the Clouds (Sotto le nuvole) | 2025 Venice Film Festival Review

Staples of Naples: Rosi Sifts Through Timeworn Sediments

The past informs the present of modern day Naples in Below the Clouds, the latest documentary from Gianfranco Rosi. Much like his famous filmmaking father Francesco Rosi sought to mine Italy’s past through narrative cinema, his son continues his homage to their country in documentary form. In the vein of his earlier Golden Lion winning Sacro GRA (2013), which depicted a smattering of lives connected to the circular roadway on the outskirts of Rome, and his Golden Bear winning Fire at Sea (2016), which dealt directly with the refugee crisis affecting modern day Lampedusa, his latest is a mixture of how colliding histories shift interpretations. As an overview, Rosi crafts essences of subconscious, subterranean parallels with how the past has informed our contemporary understanding but has hardly saved us from repeating similar circumstances resulting in the same conflicts.

Rosi approaches obscured angles of Naples, going above and below, inside and out. An inescapable starting point is the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which abruptly wiped out whole communities but kept them preserved indefinitely, creating an archeological wonder still being explored and interpreted. An opening quote from Jean Cocteau, “Vesuvius makes all the clouds of the world,” can be read as figuratively and literally, as the eruption and our understanding of it has rippled out beyond Naples in the ensuing centuries. Rosi begins his elliptical rhythm across his subjects with vintage documentary footage, returning to this vacant cinema with clips of grave robbers being interviewed and even a sequence form Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), a film about a troubled married couple traveling to Naples, witnessing human remains being excavated. What often feels like a comprehensive scope is often an ambiguous montage, a far cry from the worthwhile Naples documentary from another noted auteur, Abel Ferrara’s Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009).

The hallowed reverence for the past, solidified with Rosi’s pristine, sometimes breathtaking black and white cinematography, is the veritable lens through which everything is articulated. Law enforcement searches for clandestine tunnel sites to catch modern grave robbers, a procedural reality behind the impetus for something like Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023). This vigilance over a constant struggle to preserve the past and contain the present is linked to the constant threat of earthquakes and natural disasters. Lightly comedic moments transpire as we witness the fire department take calls from concerned citizens whenever tremors are detected, unsure of another human entity to turn to for comfort and reassurance. These calls are mixed in with domestic disputes, crank calls, and irate citizens.

Much like Fire at Sea, Rosi connects his subject to present day miseries. Syrian tankers unload Ukrainian soft grain, concerned about their inevitable return to Odessa, where their occupation might result in their death, collateral damage in Russia’s bombing campaigns. This is further juxtaposed with Japanese archaeologists, who, for the past twenty years have been excavating Villa Augustea, convinced more remains from Pompeii exist undiscovered in the sediment. A lecture from a Japanese archaeologist ties together some of these disparate themes, how wars over food and resources dwindled in the wake of food distribution to consumerist cities under the Roman Empire.

Another focal point is Tutti, a droll teacher reading Les Miserables, who runs an after school study hall for students of various ages. A wide array of subjects are being studied among a handful of children, relating to the same notion voiced by a woman charged with overseeing rooms full of ancient artifacts decommissioned for exhibition—time is both a destructive and preserving force, sometimes all jumbled together, as those existing in any moment known as the present must sift through these remnants with the help of the knowledge and skills passed down from those before. In essence, like Rosi’s body of work, it’s the way cinema operates, preserving moments of time in celluloid, our shifting version of amber, these digital fossils.

Reviewed on August 30th at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – In Competition. 115 Mins.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆