Below The Clouds
Documentary • 2025 • 1h 54m
Sotto Le Nuvole
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
A composite portrait of Naples, observed through eyes seeking hidden details and subtle meanings. The film weaves together seemingly isolated scenes: the devotion of worshippers in procession, archaeologists at work among the ruins, animals inhabiting the urban and natural landscape, and the activities of firefighters and law enforcement. Each fragment is a piece of a mosaic exploring the tensions between past and present, between the visible and the invisible, between order and chaos. With black-and-white as an aesthetic and meditative lens, Rosi transforms the city into a theater of contrasts, where reality assumes the slow, contemplative rhythm of a rarefied experience, composed of powerful images and eloquent silences.
"Cinema offers a 'superpower' of conceptual possibilities, increasing the affective and cognitive impact of the filmic experience."
– Julio Cabrera
A sensory and reflective journey between the Gulf and Mount Vesuvius: the stage for a narrative that intertwines historical memory, everyday life, and existential tension. With a careful and respectful gaze, Rosi explores a lesser-known Naples, made up of fragments of life layered over the ruins of the past.
The film unfolds like a mosaic of interwoven stories: the devout procession to the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, Japanese archaeologists who have been excavating Villa Augustea for twenty years, trotting horses training on the shore, firefighters confronting the fears of the inhabitants, and law enforcement chasing tomb raiders. Each scene is a fragment of a complex and stratified reality, where past and present coexist and mutually influence each other.
The choice of black-and-white is not only aesthetic but also philosophical: Rosi invites us to see the city and its inhabitants through a lens that emphasizes shadows and light, contradictions and harmonies, wounds and hopes. His camera becomes a tool of excavation—not only physical but also emotional and intellectual—seeking to penetrate the surface of things to grasp their deepest essence.
The soundtrack accompanies the images with music that amplifies the emotions and reflections evoked by the scenes, creating a suspended and meditative atmosphere. The editing contributes to the rhythm and cohesion of the narrative, breaking and alternating moments of silence and noise, calm and tension, intimacy and distance.
Sotto le nuvole is a film that stimulates the capacity for observation and listening, as well as reflection on our relationship with history, territory, others, and ourselves. It is a work that shows us how to look, how to discover the beauty and complexity of the surrounding world, to recognize traces of the past in the present, and to imagine possible visions.
A subtle exercise in rigorous and composite observation, yet playful and lighthearted. Rosi neither concedes nor refers elsewhere: the film privileges visual structure, the contrast of light and shadow, to construct an aesthetic map of the city and its inhabitants. Each shot is calibrated, each sequence carefully considered, in a formal pursuit that foregrounds the texture of space, the materiality of bodies, and the articulation of gestures. The work asserts itself as a study of visual matter, where human presence emerges as an element within a complex and layered landscape.
"The image manifests the other of the visible, of the representable: that other which is revealed in the visible while hiding from it."
– Giuseppe Di Giacomo
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
