#640 - Gianfranco Rosi on Pompei: Below the Clouds

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Pompei: Below the Clouds director Gianfranco Rosi as he discusses his documentary with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF63 selection, Pompei: Below the Clouds opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 6th with in-person filmmaker Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets now at filmlinc.org/clouds

The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Pompei: Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection. A MUBI release.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.