Under the Clouds [NYFF 2025]
Studio: Mubi
Gianfranco Rosi
Oct 12, 2025
What makes a metropolis? Is it the individuals, the setting, the group? Why do some cities have a lot soul, whereas others haven’t any identification in any respect? The town is a confounding, paradoxical place. There’s a lot group, but it seems like nothing is organized. With a lot happening, it feels just like the idea of an enormous, populous and packed metropolis shouldn’t work. And but, it does.
Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi’s glorious new documentary, Under the Clouds, makes use of the town of Napoli as a launching level to meditate on the countless complexities of the city setting. It’s additionally a surprising examination of the suspension of time, the preservation of historical past and the load of the previous.
Shot in beautiful, genuinely jaw-dropping black and white, the documentary doesn’t present clear reasoning for its structural or stylistic selections. The main focus of the movie is various. We continually revisit sure conditions, like scenes from one of many metropolis’s public security workplaces, a Japanese-led excavation, or a cargo ship docked within the Neapolitan harbor.
All of the conditions, although working in several worlds, supply an alternate perspective on metropolis life. We see Napoli by the eyes of those that dwell there, in addition to those that transit by. Within the 115-minute movie, we spend little time within the metropolis’s historic middle or at its most touristy websites. As a substitute, by our immersion into tales of individuals not essentially on the perimeter of society, however not on the middle of it both, we emerge with a a lot deeper understanding of the town’s complexity than we’d get from a ‘normal’ documentary on the town’s historical past and legacy.
Every story is compelling by itself; the best way that Rosi blends them collectively is probably much more compelling. We by no means spend an excessive amount of time with one group of topics earlier than transferring to the subsequent. As a result of the movie’s themes are evident early on, given the town’s in depth historical past looming within the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, viewers are thus tasked with puzzling the narratives collectively, figuring out how every story furthers Rosi’s thesis.
So many documentaries in modern cinema—notably, streaming documentaries—spell issues out for the viewer, typically working like a visible Wikipedia article somewhat than a thought-provoking examination of a particular topic or theme. It’s refreshing to look at a movie that so adamantly retains its viewers guessing, by no means conforming to expectations of what a documentary can (or ought to) be.
Although Rosi’s movie is observational, it by no means actually feels that approach. In contrast to a Fredrick Wiseman movie, for instance, you at all times know that Rosi is there behind the digicam, even when the scenes and conditions themselves really feel so far-removed from something you’d anticipate to see on-screen. Every shot is pristine and polished. You possibly can really feel the varied blocking selections that go into every sequence, whether or not that be the place the characters are sitting, their distance from each other or their motion inside the body.
Under the Clouds’ resistance to adapt to this mode of filmmaking makes it all of the extra unforgettable. Chances are you’ll be watching a documentary a few metropolis over 2,800 years outdated; the sheer variety of excavations that happen throughout the movie makes that reality apparent. However Rosi’s filmmaking model seems like that of the long run, a revolutionary storytelling model that really breathes life into a method that would use a few of it.
Writer ranking: 8/10
