BELOW THE CLOUDS (SOTTO LE NUVOLE) Documentary

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, documentary master Gianfrano Rosi (SACRO GRA, FIRE AT SEA) explores the city and surroundings of Naples, Italy, a place where every day, thousands of years of history echo and resonate for its people. 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 informed by its history — literally, in the sense of the buried architecture and relics found beneath the ground, across a network of tunnels, which we see visited variously by students, tourists, law enforcement officers, fire fighters 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, right up to today, and reveal the thousands of fascinating antiquities consigned to storage in Naples’ Archaeological Museum, in a sense still 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 lonely voices simply asking for the correct time — a regular caller and a daily occurrence, the operator informs us. All taken together, Rosi’s mosaic portrait shows us a place where creation and destruction, reverence and desecration, and the past and the present all live side by side. –Todd Hitchcock