“Vesuvius creates all the clouds of the world”. With this poetic citation by Jean Cocteau, Gianfranco Rosi opens Below the Clouds [+lee también:
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Shot in luminous black and white, Below the Clouds is the result of three years lived “on the horizon of Vesuvius, looking for traces of history, the excavation of time, what remains of everyday life”, as the filmmaker explained. Guiding the spectator’s gaze through space and the narrative time of the film is the Circumvesuviana, the 142 kilometres-long railway network that traverses the oriental part of Naples’s metropolitan area, inhabited by 2 million people. A land that shakes and boils over from the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields that blow out their sulphurous gases and their vapours at high temperatures. A land that sometimes trembles, as demonstrated by the hundreds of calls to the firefighters, determined to reassure citizens asking if “there will be other earthquakes”.

It is the magnificence of ancient art - “this is a real goldmine, says public prosecutor Nunzio Fragliasso” - that celebrates a past of poignant sumptuousness and counterbalances the devastation of the urban landscape generated for years by corrupt politics and which dates back to the “gutting of Naples”, a project by Borboni launched in 1889. Heads and busts are catalogued with dedications to Maria Morisco, archaeologist and conservator at the National Archeological Museum of Naples. The meticulousness and loving passion with which a team of Japanese archaeologists has been digging for 20 years in the Villa Augustea, collecting fragments of history, is moving. On the other hand, law enforcement’s belated and exhausting hunting of the “tombaroli”, who over decades have taken away entire mosaics of unspeakable beauty through long tunnels dug into the ground, provokes outrage. In the Madonna dell’Arco church, at the feet of Mount Vesuvius, devotees pray by crawling on the ground, while Concetto Leveque, called Titti, the “street maestro”, is involved in after-school activities for teenagers at his antique shop.

And yet, amongst the most beautiful images in Below the Clouds, there aren’t only the Roman cities (some of which are by now submerged by the sea), Pompei or Ercolano, that chase a buried past, but also the present day of trotting horses that jockeys launch for training on the shorelines of deserted winter beaches, and the sailors of that Syrian ship docked in Naples that transported 38,000 tonnes of Ukrainian wheat, leaving from the Odessa port, the target of Putin’s missiles and drones.

The editing by Fabrizio Federico (who collaborated with Rosi on the recent In viaggio [+lee también:
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Below the Clouds was produced by 21Uno Film and Stemal Entertainment with Rai Cinema, in association with French outfits Les Films d’Ici and Arte France Cinéma. International sales are handled by The Match Factory.