<\/p>\n
If the regular recipe for success in the modern entertainment industry or on social media is being loud, attention-seeking and a prolific creator of “content”, Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi has carved out a career doing the exact opposite.<\/p>\n
The work of the award-winning documentary producer is everything our contemporary culture is not: slow, nuanced, contemplative.<\/p>\n
It’s a strategy that has taken him to the pinnacle of European cinema — he’s won the top Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Golden Bear in Berlin — and has pushed the boundaries for non-fiction in the process.<\/p>\n
“There were people saying ‘How can you give a Golden Lion to someone that never directed an actor?'” he told AFP. “It’s not important that division for me (between fiction and documentary). What I feel close to is cinema.” <\/p>\n
His latest work “Sotto le nuvole” (“Below the Clouds” in English), which releases internationally in France this week, is a portrait of the gritty Italian port of Naples.<\/p>\n
It bears all the hallmarks of Rosi’s distinct way of working.<\/p>\n
The 61-year-old, who also holds American nationality, believes in “immersion”, often heading to live alone at the location of his films with no script and only a vague notion of what he is trying to capture.<\/p>\n
He spent three years in Naples, wandering, meeting people, filming relentlessly, finding the characters whose lives form the core of the 115-minute production. <\/p>\n
“I’m a director that doesn’t go home to sleep. I’m always on location,” he explained.<\/p>\n
For 2013’s “Sacra GRA”, his breakthrough documentary, he spent two years living in a van around the ringroad on the outskirts of Rome where he slowly won the confidence of his subjects: an ambulance driver, an eel farmer, a faded aristocrat, prostitutes.<\/p>\n
“Notturno”, which released in 2020, saw Rosi spend over three years on the borders of Iraq and Syria, documenting the impact of the Islamic State group.<\/p>\n
His first film “Boatman” took five years to complete. <\/p>\n
“Time is my biggest investment,” he told AFP. “Working alone allows me to wait for the right moment, to create a certain intimacy with the people I meet, and allows me to wait for the right light.”<\/p>\n
– Meditation on time –<\/p>\n
Rosi’s film-making process is only part of his craft, with his visual language and approach to story-telling also setting him apart.<\/p>\n
He disdains the look of many modern documentaries — shaky handheld camera work and an urgent, grave tone — preferring a static vantage point, with a fixed lens.<\/p>\n
He frames wide and his camera lingers, leaving long pauses that he likens to the space between notes in a piece of music, or the void between the lines of a poem.<\/p>\n
He conducts no on-screen interviews, does no narration, and allows himself a strict minimum of directing his subjects to ensure his work remains almost entirely observational.<\/p>\n
“Below the Clouds” features a handful of unconnected people around Naples — an after-school teacher, a fire department call-centre operator, a sailor, archeologists — whose lives are revealed little by little in looping segments.<\/p>\n
There is no place for pizza, football, sun-drenched piazzas, or the mafia — the cliches of Napolitean life.<\/p>\n
“There’s always a very strong stereotype about Naples,” he explained. “I wanted to get rid of all the elements that belong to the collective imagination of people.”<\/p>\n
Overall, it is a meditation on time that links the ancient Vesuvius volcano that looms over the city to its buried Roman past and its often chaotic present.<\/p>\n
“The film, for me, is a reflection on the complexity of Naples and on history, on the weight of the past, and somehow on suspended time,” he added.<\/p>\n
It is shot in black-and-white to give it a vintage feel, while the sparse musical score is provided by Britain’s Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for his work on “The Brutalist”.<\/p>\n
Reviews of Rosi’s film were overwhelmingly positive when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it won the Special Jury prize.<\/p>\n
The Hollywood Reporter said Rosi “makes documentaries like no-one else” and called his latest work “stunning”.<\/p>\n
The Guardian gave it a five-star rating, saying it was “another of (Rosi’s) brilliantly composed docu-mosaic assemblages of scenes and tableaux.”<\/p>\n
adp\/rmb<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If the regular recipe for success in the modern entertainment industry or on social media is being loud, attention-seeking and a prolific creator of “content”, Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi has carved out a career doing the exact opposite. The work of the award-winning documentary producer is everything our contemporary culture is not: slow, nuanced, contemplative. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2163890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[415302,358639,355723,415303,333428],"class_list":["post-2163889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-documentary-producer","tag-gianfranco-rosi","tag-golden-lion","tag-port-of-naples","tag-venice-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/the-slow-documentary-maker-in-a-frantic-world.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163891,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163889\/revisions\/2163891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2163890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}