Archives: Films

Film notes to follow.

Film notes to follow.

Matthew’s Film Notes

“I give you ‘dot dot dots.’ You put the word.”

–Gianfranco Rosi on Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025)

In an illuminating masterclass that took place at the ICA’s Frames of Representation festival in 2021, Gianfranco Rosi jokingly lamented that producing only six films in a career that, at that point, had lasted almost thirty years, was “not such a good result.” Since then, Rosi has added two more films to his oeuvre: In Viaggio (2022, often subtitled The Travels of Pope Francis) and Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025). In Viaggio might be considered something of a curio, given that it is uncharacteristically assembled from footage not shot by Rosi himself. Intrigued by Pope Francis’s visitations to sites that he himself had filmed, such as the island of Lampedusa for Fire at Sea (2016), Rosi curates a selective archive of Pope Francis’s speeches and public reception across the world, following the beginning of his pontificate in 2013. The film is deliberately repetitive, and flatly ambivalent in its presentation: Pope Francis may speak movingly of hope and solidarity as a bulwark against the excesses of contemporary capitalism one minute, then disregard a child sexual abuse scandal to defend controversial Chilean bishop Juan Barros the next (an allegiance Francis is soon seen rowing back on). Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025), by contrast, marks a return to Rosi’s more established practice of journeying to places with an approach entirely distinct from the pope’s flying visits: spending years in one place, gradually building relationships with a community, then constructing a film out of what reality might have come to pass in front of a camera.

Rosi started out, if it is possible to conceive of seventeen years as the first phase of a career, making three quite different films “without a producer, with no money”: Boatman (1993), Below Sea Level (2008) and El Sicario, Room 164 (2010). Four years were spent making Boatman (1993), five years on Below Sea Level (2008), and only two days on El Sicario, Room 164 (2010). Of the latter, Rosi has joked that it is “a perfect film”, in the sense that “it cost $3000, [involved] two days of work, and it was extremely successful.” Taking place almost exclusively in a hotel room near the Mexico–United States border, El Sicario’s runtime is devoted to a retired hitman’s remembrances of twenty years of drug trafficking, cartel murder and torture. Again, the film is repetitive in its presentation, and at times deeply disturbing. Its budget mostly consisted of the payment demanded by the sicario for his participation, after he said to Rosi: “I used to ask $2000 to shoot people, but [now] I want $2000 for you to shoot me.”

Below Sea Level (2008), filmed in the U.S., bears the closest relation to the more widely distributed and acclaimed work of the second half of Rosi’s career: Fire at Sea (2016), Notturno (2020) and Pompei: Below the Clouds. Whereas Rosi often likes to focus on a state institution as an anchor to his documentaries—the Fire Department in Pompei: Below the Clouds, the Navy in Fire at Sea, the ambulance service in Sacro GRA (2013)—Below Sea Level depicts a makeshift society of outcasts deep in the Californian flatlands, where there is no institutional presence whatsoever: no policemen, no fire and rescue service, no electricity or running water, only individuals. A place where, “if you make a mistake, you’ll pay for it.” The people making their way through this marginal world are, variously, spiky, obstinate, funny, articulate, wise, and replete with trauma. Spending years in their company affords Rosi a level of access and intimacy that can be startling; at one point, a character not-so-affectionately known as “Insane Wayne” gets laid on camera. Rosi couldn’t secure a screening of Below Sea Level in its native America for two years after its completion in 2008, attributing this to its unwelcome focus on poverty and marginalisation in an era of blind liberal hope. Barack Obama had just been elected as president, and it would be a while before Nomadland’s much more sanitised depiction of a similar itinerant world picked up the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2021.

Rosi has intended his filmmaking practice to inspire younger filmmakers who lack financial means. Working alone with a single camera, without a budget, producer or script, gave Rosi “incredible freedom” in the first half of his career. A turning point came with the opportunity to make Sacro GRA (2013), the first time he would accept a salaried assignment. Finding himself coming out of a divorce in his mid-forties, and encouraged by his ex-wife to stay near Rome to be close to his daughter, Rosi broke with a previously-held conviction that “people should not be paid to make a film.” Rosi perceived steps toward raising funds as prescriptive, foreclosing the shape a film may take: “If you don’t write a film, it’s impossible to have a budget for a film… I always thought that writing a documentary was like starting with a lie. I always refused to pitch my film, as I didn’t know what my film was going to be.”

For Sacro GRA, Rosi lived in a campervan for three years, slowly collecting impressions of the area surrounding the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the 70km-long ring road that encircles Rome. Later, the filming of Pompei: Below the Clouds would take roughly the same period of time, with a break in the middle to edit the aforementioned In Viaggio (2022). Pompei: Below the Clouds is something of a blockbuster production for Rosi, involving a crew of two! An assistant, Alberto Landolfi, joined Rosi initially as a location scout: “Naples is a huge territory and you need to have a guide. He was able to take me around and help me discover places.” The geographic span of Pompei: Below the Clouds is broader than the ancient city of its title, taking in many aboveground, belowground and maritime sites in the surrounding Naples area. The structure of the film is quite allusive, encouraging the viewer to make connections between observations and events, filling in the blanks by almost participating in the film’s construction. Common anchor points of mainstream documentaries are absent: there is no voiceover commentary, no talking heads, no efforts to create or evoke suspense, and no sense of ‘character’ arcs experienced by participants or subjects. The viewer is granted a freedom to roam around in time, in a manner not dissimilar to Rosi’s shooting practice itself. The result of this approach is an unusually patient, deliberate, perhaps slightly sombre, film.

An investigation into underground tunnels dug by tombaroli, grave robbers who will be familiar to anyone who saw Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (2023), initially provides a loose map to the territory. The scale of the amateur tunnel excavation is breathtaking, said to resemble “an enormous open-cut mine”, a “veritable highway”, and the extent of archaeological theft might be considered to be of a similar magnitude. The spine of Pompei: Below the Clouds emerges from the time Rosi spent at the local Fire Department’s emergency call centre. After obtaining a permit and gaining the trust of the call handlers, Rosi spent so much time filming in the room that “the people who worked there became almost like family. I cooked there, sometimes even slept there!” Over the course of three years, he shot enough material at the location to make another film entirely. The generosity, openness and patience of the call handlers is as striking as it is moving. Rosi remarks, “I think if we had an Army like the Fire Department it would be fantastic; if the only Army allowed was the Fire Department, it would be the most beautiful; the world would probably be different…”

Other sections came about by pure happenstance: whilst exhibiting In Viaggio in Japan, Rosi was told about the presence of a long-running excavation on the northern slopes of Mount Vesuvius, funded by the University of Tokyo since 2002. The cavernous pits, extensive scaffolding and painstaking work of discovery around the site contribute to one of the most memorable strands of the film. N.B. The University of Tokyo is currently welcoming donations to keep the project running!

As in the previous film in our ‘26-27 season, Sirāt (2025), societal unrest and the spectre of geopolitical conflict intrudes upon a more remote or peaceful present. Reports of arson and scenes of youth unrest are accompanied by reflections from Syrian seafarers about the danger of their journey to Odessa, a transition from the “beautiful city” of Naples to a site of “non-stop bombing”. Radio broadcasts, as in Sirāt, relay the distant news of fatalities from Russian air strikes; an afterschool tutor, Titti, reflecting on a Futurist poem by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, adds, “Damn war, goddamn it, always the same old story.”

Unusually, Rosi filmed Pompei: Below the Clouds in native black-and-white, with a monochrome chip in the digital camera so colour would not be registered, or be visible through the viewfinder. This produces a profound and beautiful greyscale, alongside deep, inky blacks. Contemporary black-and-white films are more often than not shot in colour then post-converted to monochrome, and avoiding this route created certain difficulties during production. Rosi had to learn to look in black-and-white, and wait for just the right light. Clouds are prominent throughout the film, for good reason. Rosi could not shoot under the bright light of the sun as the camera’s sensor would generate too much contrast, so he had to rely exclusively on shades of grey: “The clouds are my companion when I film… If there is a day of sun I either go inside or stay in my hotel, or I wait and I wait for the right light…”

An abiding impression one might take away from Pompei: Below the Clouds is of its abundant displays of care. This is visible in the way historical artefacts, considered “friends”, are studiously inspected and preserved; in an afterschool tutor’s diligence and gentle persistence with distracted students; the considered, non-judgmental responses to emergency calls from anguished members of the public; the sight of an archaeologist gingerly uncovering ancient bones. The ways in which we approach the present, the past and each other are in constant dialogue throughout Pompei: Below the Clouds—it’s telling that the film’s present is already in archival black & white, suggesting that our negotiations with time will often be lost, and there is a need to invest in the present moment. “At the end of the film,” Rosi concludes, “I would like the viewer to ask themselves a question, ‘Is there still hope?’ Sooner or later, our civilization will be submerged like the Roman statues in the last part of the film. The question for me with that image, when everything becomes blurry and everything disappears, is, ‘What have we left behind?’”

Matthew’s Film Notes

Director Oliver Laxe is developing a habit of channelling the tumultuous energy of the present moment into his films. His 2019 feature Fire Will Come tells of an arsonist returning to his hometown in Galicia after a stint in prison, and features extraordinary footage of uncontained wildfires raging through the night. Laxe, his actors and crew had to train as firefighters to safely film amidst these forest fires, an approach that was particularly necessary at night, as visibility declines and risk increases sharply (Laxe observed at the time, “now, if it doesn’t work for me as a filmmaker, I can be a firefighter [Laughs]”). Watched in the summer of 2026, as record-breaking heatwave temperatures caused extensive wildfires to spread across France, Greece and Spain, Fire Will Come appears prophetic: it vividly captures an emergent ecological reality.

Sirāt continues this tendency, but will hopefully not prove quite so prescient: it is set largely in the Moroccan desert, an arid landscape of “nothing but dirt,” as World War III breaks out in the unseen distance. In the foreground, Sirāt focuses on an immediate quest: a father (Sergi López) and son (Bruno Núñez Arjona)‘s search for their missing daughter/sister, a raver who has vanished while travelling with a transnational ‘free party’ community, hopping from one illicit event to the next. During the film’s initial, limited theatrical release in the United States, Laxe published a message asking critics and viewers not to divulge any spoilers to fresh audiences, so further plot detail will duly be withheld here.

Sirāt opens with its key attributes front and centre: a reverb-heavy, distorted techno soundtrack (that will later ‘dematerialise’, by design, into a more otherworldly soundscape); grainy analogue Super 16mm photography; and a sparse, minimalist approach to storytelling. Its opening scenes plunge the viewer into the midst of a three-day long party that was not faked for the camera, a “pretty crazy” event according to composer Kangding Ray: “I can tell you it was a proper rave, so what you see on screen has a kind of documentary realism to it.” Ray, after finishing most of the music for the film before shooting commenced, played a long set on one of the nights, and appears in a brief cameo role as the military arrives to shut the party down. News of the onset of war is relayed by radio broadcast, and geopolitical catastrophe begins to weigh heavy in the air. One of the characters will eventually ask, ”Is this what the end of the world feels like?” Only to receive the reply, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

Contemporary cinema is often crying out for a realism of the body, which the elemental look and feel of Sirāt delivers: missing limbs, weathered skin and imperfect teeth replace the manicured cosmetics of less off-grid productions. Continuing a tradition Laxe has adopted in all his feature films, five non-professional actors accompany lead actor Sergi López, blurring the boundary between fictional storytelling and the non-fictional presence of an existing community.

A highly informative article by Ben Kenigsberg in The New York Times details the backgrounds of some of these non-professional actors, who were discovered through a guerilla casting process led by Laxe’s costume designer and former partner, Nadia Acimi, drawing from the rave culture that she herself has been a part of:

The unforgettable Jade Oukid, 38, from France, was found by Acimi in a crowd of 10,000 at a festival in Portugal. Oukid describes herself as a photographer, an amateur filmmaker and a seamstress who works with vegan leather; her dog Pipa features in Sirāt, alongside canine castmate Lupita. Pipa sadly died just after filming concluded, but was posthumously awarded the prestigious Palm Dog Grand Jury Prize for her contribution, and a heartfelt tribute was paid to her during the awards ceremony. Oukid’s scepticism about the historic pitfalls of participating in projects that portray rave culture from the outside, and a concern about the colonial implications of visiting North Africa to film, had to be overcome for her to take part.

French municipal street festival performer Tonin Janvier, 42, was able to draw on his familiarity with African terrain: he toured in Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Guinea as a child in a travelling theatre family, and more recently spent six years selling old French vehicles in Mali and Senegal. “I’ve been through things that were even more perilous than in the film, and yet I’ve made it,” he says, referencing a motorcycle collision that has left more than a visible scar: “I’m still alive — I do have a leg missing — but I’m still here.”

Stefania Gadda, 50, from Italy, came to the film from life “in the fields,” without electricity or running water on a ranch near Granada, Spain: “I feel I’m more of a peasant than I am a raver,” she has disclosed. As the nonprofessional actors were initially unsettled by the presence of the camera, Laxe had to work on building their confidence for an unconventional shoot that took place in, at times, harsh conditions of “intense heat and dust”. The actors spent time living at Laxe’s home in Galicia (in northwestern Spain), cooking together, taking walks and rehearsing, whilst at times reawakening rave culture’s pastime of heavy drinking and eschewing a normative bedtime. The resultant close bond between the actors is palpable in the finished film.

What might, unexpectedly, tie Sirāt to the previous film in our ‘26-27 season, A Private Life (2025)? That the act of immersion in the film’s narrative, images and sounds can become a spur to self-discovery. Laxe feels that Sirāt is “a healthy film,” that its shocks and upsets provide a means for viewers to break through to a different level of perception and emotion, in a manner almost similar to what a psychotherapist might try to achieve. Laxe has been studying psychotherapy, but has said psychological categories don’t readily translate to the language of cinema, as “the way that cinema can capture the soul of a human being and their wound is precious and really particular.” The characters in Sirāt remain purposely undeveloped, in order for the film to show “their vulnerability through images.” As viewers, we are encouraged “to look inside” and re-encounter our own pain inside ourselves, as the pain of the world in which we live continues to unfold around us.

Audience Comments

• Tedious melodrama, waste of money and time making it.
• Amazing, visceral, extraordinary, WOW!
• A rich sensory experience. Absolutely superb!
• Brilliant! Music was hypnotic, acting great, scenery something else
• Best film I have seen in a while. I even liked the music, much to my surprise
• Great soundtrack! Reminded me of Wendy Carlos (obvs). A mythic journey through Hades?
• Enjoyed it. Unusual and brilliant film, thought provoking. Need to discuss.
• One of the most shocking, unexpected films I have seen, compelling. P.S. Although not sure why they didn’t follow their tyre tracks back the way they came to avoid the mines!
• A true journey into hell. The minefield scenes were so very tense and hard to watch.
• Ridiculous storyline, clumsy unconvincing script
• Very tense, acting excellent
• Bleak but I am sure I will continue to ponder on this film.
• Unsatisfying
• Shocking, thought provoking and enigmatic
• What a horrible film. Shocking
• Too shocking for me
• Weird
• I’d imagine it’s difficult to make a movie so I’d like to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt…. not today sorry
• Different but enjoyable
• Tense and brutal, absolutely desolate. At a certain point the brutality felt senseless and I didn’t feel for the characters as much as I should have, they felt underdeveloped and hollow.
• Contemporary, abstract. Graphic landscapes and night amazing. Probably need paracetamol to see it. Quite shocking the way things work out. Felt they ran out of actors at the end!
• Too stressful
• So weird. Absolute mess. But also somehow captivating. It all literally blew up.
• I don’t understand
• Tense tragic and no resolution
• Interesting, shocking and depressing
• You never know where life will take you.
• Not sure, started off really well and I thought it was very original until the end when mines started and I thought it got a bit ridiculous. Or maybe I didn’t get the metaphors.
• Bleak and distressing
• Amazing sound design. Felt like a combination of Climax and Sorcerer. But the plot and direction felt forced and meandering
• Not sure what they was about! Scenery amazing, music terrible.
• Bit slow to start, but picked up and took quite a dark turn. Probably more enjoyable 20 years younger and under the influence.
• Engaging! Gruelling!
• Sandy
• Very intense film. Amazing music and scenery. Terribly sad, traumatic.
• Gripping and deadly
• Stunning visually and emotionally. Great music, frustrated at start with incompetent dad but he came good in the end!
• Just shocking! Such an amazing work, humane
• Hypnotic and mystical, we were all on the bridge as fine as a hair and sharp as a sword.
• WOW

Matthew’s Film Notes

“In my civil life, I’m a lover, I like to love. And in my films I was really austere, you know, you saw my first ones. And I felt it was really the time, I felt the responsibility as a filmmaker to offer something still meaningful, but with a levity.”

–Rebecca Zlotowski on A Private Life (2025)

It’s hard to know exactly how to characterise A Private Life: a wry exploration of the contemporary function of psychoanalysis, an idiosyncratic whodunnit, an amateur detective caper? Thierry Frémaux presented the film as a “screwball comedy” at the 78th Festival de Cannes press conference, and Philip Concannon suggests the film might best be understood “as an example of the comedy of remarriage subgenre.” Being hard to pin down is far from a bad thing.

Director Rebecca Zlotowoski has fulfilled a purportedly lifelong dream by casting Jodie Foster as Jewish-American psychoanalyst Lilian Steiner, who resides and practises in Paris. We are introduced to Lilian as she is deserted by one client for the market alternative of hypnotism, and soon another of Lilian’s longstanding clients dies: Paula (Virginie Efira), whose wake is attended by Lilian, before she is abruptly thrown out by Paula’s husband (played by the esteemed Mathieu Amalric). Reeling in shock, and, perhaps, guilt, Lilian develops an unspecified disorder of uncontrollable weeping, turning her world upside down: now, the psychiatrist sits in tears, listening to her clients. Lilian fixates on Paula’s case and death, conspiratorially, sending her down multiple avenues of investigation, which turns the film into an almost knockabout caper.

Recently, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (2024) thematised the way conspiracy can function as a desire, when grieving, to find or create a coherent narrative for tragedy. Of grappling with grief, Cronenberg says: “It cannot be the truth, and if it’s not the truth, then you’re looking for the reason why this impossible thing happened. Some person, some force made it happen because why would it happen otherwise?” This is the vortex Lilian is sucked into, and it proves transformative, as Lilian’s ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) joins her in her pursuit. As Philip Concannon notes, “It’s a pleasure to watch these two great actors bounce off each other, as characters rediscovering the spark within themselves and in their relationship.”

A Private Life has, at times fleetingly, a storied cast: Irène Jacob, whose performance as Weronika/Véronique in The Double Life of Veronique (1991) was recently screened in our Summer Season, plays a professional confidant (wearing red, of course!) sharing a cigarette with Foster, and venerable documentarian Frederick Wiseman makes his final film appearance as an actor before his passing earlier this year. Aurore Clément, star of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974)—Malle’s 1962 film Vie privée is referenced through A Private Life’s title—appears as octogenarian Perle Friedman, a ghost haunting Paula’s mind. Clément recalls, in an interview with Le Monde, “Rebecca spoke to me about a character, a survivor of the camps, who seems to have emerged from the night. So I brought to the set earrings that were given to me by Therese Giehse, a German actress who fled Nazism and with whom I acted in Lacombe, Lucien. I lost one on the set of Apocalypse Now (1979), and they made one out of papier-mâché for me…” That replica is the one that appears on screen in A Private Life. The cast is rounded out and made a family affair by Zlotowski’s father Michel, playing the rabbi who buries Paula; he has now featured in all her films since Planetarium (2016).

Perhaps surprisingly, A Private Life finds itself in the midst of a contentious debate and point of transition for the film industry: the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into the production of moving image media. In a recent talk entitled Who Owns the Future of Hollywood?, Foster described Zlotowski’s experimentation with AI for visualising a journey into Lilian’s subconscious midway through the film:

“I did a film, a very small French movie that had no money at all, and we had a sequence that is like a dream sequence, but is kind of inside [Lilian’s] subconscious. The director fed the information into AI, and said, what would you spit out? And AI spat out images that made absolutely no sense, but were beautiful. They were weird, strangely emotional, referring back to some time in our past that we didn’t quite understand, and the director was able to dominate and contain what the computer didn’t really understand it was doing.

That’s a really good example of being able to dominate AI, which if we are able to do consistently, over time, we can make things that reflect us and make things better. However, will we be able to dominate this particular technology for more than a couple of years? I don’t know.”

Foster went on to suggest that recent Hollywood blockbuster F1 (2025) is a quintessential film of the emergent AI era: F1’s structure is “exactly the structure that you would learn in school”, and the actors say lines exactly how a computer would write them. In this light, it’s easy to see why A Private Life appealed so much to Foster: not just the challenge of performing in a non-native language (Foster has said learning lines gets much harder with age, particularly so in another language!), but the project’s quirkiness, unpredictability, its overspill of unsettled, cyclical human relations and compulsions. Lilian uses an older technology, the now fully obsolete MiniDisc, to record her sessions of psychoanalysis; it is hopefully not a spoiler to say that she eventually outgrows the format. Technology comes and goes, and the act of listening and understanding remains a deeply human occupation.

Audience Comments

• Amusing, thrilling, funny. A great film! And wow – Jodie Foster’s French is amazing!
• Fascinating! Studied reflections of characters. Subtle but relatable
• Captivating. Jodie in every scene
• Very French with American style!
• Loved this film – so many twists and beautifully acted. Very atmospheric and loved hearing another language
• “Bloody French!” P.S. Does it never stop raining?
• Fascinating and farce in equal measure. Rubbish music
• Absurd and boring. Great music though
• I didn’t really get the plot but she enjoyed it