Below the Clouds, the new documentary from award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi has been acquired by The Match Factory.

Gianfranco Rosi is best known for Sacro Gra (2013), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and Fire at Sea (2016), which won the Berlinale Golden Bear and the European Film Award for Best Documentary, and was nominated for an Academy Award. His 2021 film Notturno was selected for the Venice Competition and received nominations for Best Documentary at Camerimage and the David di Donatello Awards. In 2024, Rosi was honored by Camerimage with the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Documentary Filmmaking.

Here is the synopsis: The land around Vesuvius is a vast palimpsest. On the surface, underground, and even beneath the sea of the modern city of Naples and its surroundings, the memory of history is etched into tunnels, walls and fissures, the remains of women, children, and men – statues, buried cities. Only thin layers separate contemporary and ancient life, and the past puts its stamp on the present: on archaeologists, scholars and tomb raiders, on firemen and schoolchildren, tourists and sailors, the devout and the indifferent.

With Below the Clouds, Rosi returns to his native city of Naples and its suburbs, a region whose inhabitants for almost three millennia have, sometimes uneasily, co-existed with the nearby volcano of Mount Vesuvius and where many of the challenges of the modern age are informed by a complicated past.

Currently in the final stages of postproduction after two years of shooting, Below the Clouds is produced by Rosi’s company 21Uno Film, in collaboration with Stemal Entertainment, led by Donatella Palermo.