Short Films

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POMPEI: BELOW THE CLOUDS
SOTTO LE NUVOLE

• Director: Gianfranco Rosi
• ITALY / 2025 / DCP / Colour / 115' / Italian, Arabic-Syrian, Japanese, Neapolitan, English; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Gianfranco Rosi, Carmelo Marabello, Marie-Pierre Müller
• Director of Photography: Gianfranco Rosi
• Editing: Fabrizio Federico
• Music: Daniel Blumberg
• Producer: Gianfranco Rosi, Donatella Palermo, Paolo Del Brocco
• Production Co.: 21Uno Film, Stemal Entertainment, Rai Cinema
• World Sales: The Match Factory

2025 Venice Special Jury Prize

‘Naples is not Italy, Naples is a nation on its own,’ says Italian nonfiction maestro Gianfranco Rosi who lived and filmed at the horizons of Vesuvius for three years: ‘Seeking traces of history, the excavation of time, the remains of everyday life. I captured the stories in the voices of those who spoke; I watched the clouds and the smoke rising from the Phlegraean Fields.’ A teacher runs a makeshift afterschool, law enforcement tracks down tomb robbers, while in the port of Torre Annunziata, Syrian tankers unload Ukrainian grain, a team of Japanese archaeologists continue their twenty-year excavation. Below the clouds of volcanic vapours lies a territory crisscrossed by locals, worshippers, tourists, statues, fragments, and ruins. The land that skirts the gulf is a vast time machine. Filled with voices, with lives between the sea, the sky, and Vesuvius, this film is a riveting, lesser-known portrait of Naples, that we experience anew.

This film is screened with the support of Istituto Italiano Istanbul.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.