On the latest episode of FLC Luminaries, our video series that spotlights talent at all levels of the filmmaking process who uplift the art and craft of cinema, Pompei: Below the Clouds director Gianfranco Rosi discusses his beautifully shot documentary that won a Special Jury Prize at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

An NYFF63 selection, Pompei: Below the Clouds is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center through April 8th and is streaming on MUBI.

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.