Rating: NR | Runtime: 115 minutes
Release Date: September 18th, 2025 (Italy) / March 6th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Gianfranco Rosi
Writer(s): Gianfranco Rosi

Has there been an earthquake?

Naples proves the physical embodiment of eternalism as past, present, and future exist simultaneously for Gianfranco Rosi’s camera to capture in black and white. There are excavation sites unearthing Roman artifacts and fossils. Current attempts to educate (an older gentleman helps kids do homework at his shop), feed (Ukrainian grain moving from ship to silo), and protect (residents constantly ringing the fire department’s call center). And the uncertainty of another Vesuvius eruption.

Pompei: Below the Clouds also reveals the multicultural landscape of these systems from Syrian sailors to Japanese archeologists alongside local curators documenting sprawling collections of statues and reliefs. You get a little of their personalities via brief vignettes, but the film is mostly a fly-on-the-wall look at their work. The gorgeous hidden tombs, insane raiding tunnels, destroyed theaters, and often incredulous reactions to “emergency” calls that prove anything but.

Rosi shoots some amazing footage, but these location essay films have never been my thing. I enjoy them on a purely aesthetic level, but their focus on thematic connections renders the journey too much of a non-narrative slog. It’s an anthropological study of a moment in which everyone’s focus seems glued to what happened and might happen again.

Pompei: Below the Clouds had an Oscars-qualifying run on November 7th, 2025.

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A scene from POMPEI: BELOW THE CLOUDS; courtesy of MUBI.