From Oscar nominated filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi (Fire at Sea) comes an exquisite and entirely fresh vision of a region that’s forever perched between the present day and the ancient past. Between Mount Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples, the ground shakes periodically and the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields taint the air, while a lesser-known everyday Naples emerges with its poetry, personalities, and anxiety.

Below the mountain clouds lies a territory crisscrossed by locals, worshippers, tourists, and archaeologists excavating a past that in museums will give new life and meaning to statues, fragments, and ruins. Meanwhile firemen in their command center calm the fears of locals, law enforcement tracks down tomb robbers, and in the port of Torre Annunziata, Syrian tankers unload Ukrainian grain. Shot by Rosi himself in incandescent and mysterious black and white, Pompei: Below the Clouds is cinema as living time machine, somehow always forever ago and precisely now.

Opens for a run on March 13