There are a million shades of gray in Gianfranco Rosi’s vividly textured and multilayered black-and-white documentary BELOW THE CLOUDS. Rosi shot and edited the film during three years in Naples, a sprawling and vibrant city that also feels haunted, with the volcanic Mount Vesuvius–which destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D.–looming on the horizon. The film’s title comes from Jean Cocteau’s statement “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world,” and with its panorama of disparate stories, this intimate but dreamlike film pictures a world where everyone is interconnected, across space and time.
Over a period of three or four years, Rosi filmed a disparate group of people, including archaeologists patiently and painstakingly uncovering artifacts in massive dig sites; a museum curator tending to the decaying statues of vanquished warriors; a tireless teacher who shares Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and other daunting classics with a group of teens; a fire department’s headquarters, where dispatchers tend to a never-ending assortment of real or exaggerated emergencies; and a duo of Syrian shipworkers who escape the ravages of war in their own country by helping to transport tons of Ukrainian wheat from Odessa to Italy. Odd connections emerge; a mountain of grain looks unmistakably like Vesuvius, Russia’s war on Ukraine is linked to the many conquests of the Roman empire. And a teenager obsessed with food who aspires to be a chef, studies the many different ways to cook grain.
BELOW THE CLOUDS celebrates the work of archeologists, but it also reveals that cinema itself is a form of archaeology. Rosi frames the film with scenes of old footage being projected in vast decaying cinemas, reminding us that movies outlive the people who are in them, the people who made them, and the people who first watched them. And in his work as a cinéma vérité filmmaker, he is a type of archaeologist himself, creating an exquisite, richly detailed, record of present-day life that will live on as both an artifact of its time, and an artwork for the ages.
Science & Film was pleased to talk with Rosi at the Toronto International Film Festival, where BELOW THE CLOUDS had its North American premiere. Ahead of its U.S. premiere at the 63rd New York Film Festival, Mubi announced the film will release in early 2026, following a qualifying release in fall 2025.
Science & Film: Your friend, the director Pietro Marcello [director of DUSE, inspired you to make this film?
Gianfranco Rosi: Pietro is from Caserta, near Naples. When he was a kid, he used to be near Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. He always wanted to make a documentary there, but he said maybe I should do it. I have more patience, and more time to spend there to do it. Pietro drifted to big fiction films. All my colleagues in documentary abandoned me. I’m still resisting.
S&F: You have no temptation to make fiction films?
GR: No. I don't like to sit down and write a story and cast it and make it happen in three weeks, four, six weeks shooting. Everything gets consumed in such a short time. And you have to transfer what you wrote into something in time. It's a huge machine that starts with little control.
I'm a one-man crew. I have just one assistant with me. Usually, it's a local person I find. Here it was a friend of Pietro, Alberto Landolfi, a scout and location manager, who was not trained as an assistant. Pietro said, you have to contact him. He's going to take you around Naples. And then slowly he became my assistant. He spent three years with me.
S&F: One of the striking things in the film is how beautiful the language is. The way people talk about their work, and think about the meaning of what they’re doing, whether it’s archeology, or teaching, or the teenager who wants to be a chef.
GR: In all my films I always discover that there's an incredible eloquenza. Maria, who works in the museum, speaks in such an incredible way. And when people start calling in to the fire department with their crises, it’s pure theater.
I love to find in documentaries the writing that you cannot create in your room. It's something so powerful and so surprising that only real people can give you.
Everything in making my film is about casting, choosing the right people. Usually I select five, six, seven stories, and I go with them to the end of the process of writing. It's writing day by day with the camera and with their own life intimacy. And that's why it's important for me to build trust, when you enter into the unknown world of a person. They’re first a person, then they become characters eventually.
S & F: The film feels like a work of art. How do you work with your subjects while filming? How do you prepare them for the shots that you're going to do, to be themselves in front of the camera?
GR: Well, I usually choose a location, a space, and then I put my camera there and I let them be. With Maria, the museum curator, she always takes notes. I asked her, when you take notes, do you talk to yourself? She said yes, she does, it’s very common for me to do that. So I said, that's the only thing I ask, when you write, to say what you’re writing.
We filmed in a magnificent room of the museum, with sculptures of the defeated warriors. That scene is fantastic. It's completely her world and her words. And it was so beautiful, the way she described it. And it evoked the war in Ukraine. And we cut to the shipworkers bringing grain from Ukraine, and then the kid talking about how to cook great in the recipe he wants to make. There are always elements like that, that occur by chance.
And I love the Japanese archaeologist. He’s spent 22 years excavating this place. It's a collaboration between the University of Tokyo and the University of Archaeology in Naples. He just has this passion about memory and bringing the past alive.
I always want to put in my film an element of the institutional. This time I chose the fire department, and they gave me permission. I went into this room and saw that it’s like a theater, people calling in with the most bizarre problems.
And then I met the prosecutor and fell in love with him. He has an incredible mind. He's one of the busiest prosecutors because he's in an area in Naples and this area is full of criminality. And he devotes himself to fighting that. So, all the characters have a very secular sense of devotion. They are giving themselves to others, to other causes. That is the element that unifies the whole stories in the film.
S & F: I'm sure you have the feeling that you're doing a form of archaeology, that you're creating a work that is preserving the past.
GR: Well, it's like digging slowly. We spent almost four years there. When I started with the idea of making a film there, the first impact on me was a sense of history, of stratification, of time suspended, of the past, the present, the possible future, everything divided by this very thin border, which is memory, constantly.
Naples is like a huge offscreen element, something that you don't see, but it's part of the storytelling, it's there, it's like a voiceover.
S & F: Right, but you're also filming on the periphery of the city. You're filming the parts of Naples that most people don't see.
GR: Naples is like a huge time machine. Whatever you see contains something else, from the past. You have to go deep and down.
It's amazing to go under the tunnels, where the prosecutor talks about all the looting there, and says that the people who did it are stealing our memory, our past. They came here, and took all our history, our memory, from places that survived the earthquake and the war, and they have no sense of community. That's what is very important in the film, a sense of community. They all have a sense of community. That's the word I was looking for, sense of community.
Which is a devotion somehow, you know, a secular sense of devotion. They are all devoted to a cause. All the characters. The teacher, I mean, all the people are sort of passing knowledge down and also preserving for the future.
Margaret Mead (who is cancelled now) used to say that civilization starts the moment someone does something for others. The moment you start giving your attention to others, that's when civilization starts. And Naples is one of the oldest civilizations, it's like an entity on its own. That's why I love when I found that sentence of Cocteau, where he said Naples produced all the clouds in the world. This mountain is like Shiva, the destroyer and the regenerator. And feeling that this mountain is producing all the clouds of the world is such a powerful image. It brings Naples universality and it almost becomes an archetype.
S & F: It seems like the clouds might have inspired the way that you shot the film in black-and-white, like the look of the film.
GR: never shoot with no clouds because clouds don't give me a contrast. It gives all the elements of the gray. When I shoot, I wait for the clouds. And clouds become my companion. It becomes like a Greek chorus.
S & F: But what did you have in mind in terms of the style and look of the film that you wanted to make? I mean, I was thinking of other filmmakers who have made beautiful black and white films, like Peter Hutton.
GR: I didn't really have a reference. For me, the use of black and white was a narrative need. I wanted to use archival footage in the film, but I didn't know how. Pietro [Marcello] is the master of archival footage. I cannot go in that territory. I knew that I wanted to use archival footage, and I didn't know how until I discovered this broken cinema. I said, perfect, that's a story.
There are very few theaters left in Italy. People don't go to this movie. So, the cinema has become an archaeological site. And the images come alive through the memory of the screen. We filmed in two destroyed cinemas. Now they are becoming supermarkets.
Black and white makes you think of early silent film, and it makes you think of just how your film would be a record for the future. I wanted the present to become immediately archival. The present becomes immediately past. That's what the idea of black and white does for me. And black and white forces you to look at things in a different way. And transform things also. It suspends time.
When you see the way that the Ukrainian war comes into the film, you're thinking about the whole history of different wars. And the film is always dealing with transforming. You know, the mountain of the grain at the beginning looks like the volcano with the lava, but it's the grain that has been shipped from Ukraine.
S & F: All these connections that you’re talking about, how did you sculpt them in the editing room?
GR: Well, in this film I was able for the first time to do parallel work between shooting and editing. I did basically three years editing the film. Filming and editing, they were going on the same level. It was very important in this film because this was a very complex film. The fact that I was able to edit with my editor, Fabrizio Federico for three years, was a huge like a constant writing element.
And then you always find the right space for the next stories, like creating a musical composition. This note has to belong to the next note. And what is here, the silence, is the most important thing to move from this note to this other note, to this other note.
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