NYFF: Nonfiction in the Main Slate – Below The Clouds
“For the most part,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online, “the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography.” Sacro GRA “explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway.” Fire at Sea (2016), the winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, “considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of Lampedusa, a nexus of Italian and indeed European asylum immigration. Rosi left Italy to make Notturno (2020), a film about life along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Syria, an area plagued with the presence of Daesh terrorists. And now, with Below the Clouds, Rosi has made his most complex, most poetic film, based in and around Naples, a city that exists in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius.”
“Shot in black and white, with sweeping landscapes so spectrally luminous as to resemble silver gelatin prints, Below the Clouds brims with gloomy beauty,” writes José Teodoro for Film Comment. “Behold plumes of cinders, colossal cones of Ukrainian grain, Japanese archeologists brushing dirt from bone, films projected in an empty cinema, archivists exploring vast rooms of fractured statuary with only a single flashlight.”