Gianfranco Rosi makes documentaries like no one else, which may explain why he's received top awards at major festivals -- Berlin's Golden Bear for Fire at Sea, Venice's Golden Lion for Sacro GRA -- that are usually reserved for works of fiction.

Shot over several years, sometimes in far-flung places, his films are aesthetically immersive experiences that plunge us into a strange world which is, in fact, our own. Whether chronicling the highway surrounding Rome, war zones in the Middle East, an off-the-grid community in California, or African migrants arriving at Lampedusa, his movies play like exquisite ethnographic studies of our planet that were made by an alien species. Everything we see in them may be familiar, yet it all seems different and new.

The director returns to Italy with his latest work, Below the Clouds (Sotto le nuvole), for which he spent three years documenting life at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. The famous and still very active volcano was, of course, the site of a massive eruption in 79 A.D. that wiped out the city of Pompeii, whose buildings and bodies were preserved under the ash for centuries, until they were excavated as prefectly intact relics from ancient times.

Rosi's stunningly shot movie visits Pompeii's prized ruins, but also ventures into the clandestine tunnels beneath them, dug by tomb robbers selling antiquities on the black market. It then leaps high into the sky, hovering over the Gulf of Naples in a helicopter to reveal a region in danger if Vesuvius were ever to erupt again. Rosi then sequesters himself in a 911 call center as residents fear the worst following a small earthquake, then hops back outside to film local youths setting fire to the streets.

Like the magma constantly boiling beneath the volcano, Below the Clouds reveals a place that seems forever on the brink of disaster. And yet, people have managed to adapt.

In one scene, we follow Japanese archeologists carefully digging up human remains at one of Pompeii's sites. Nearby, firemen investigate the entrance to another desecrated tomb. Elsewhere, cagey teenagers study after school with an aging intellectual who reads Les Misérables, passing on knowledge to the next generation. As one insightful historian poetically puts it while wandering around a storage area loaded with priceless Roman busts and statues: "Time destroys everything, but it also preserves everything."

There are no direct interviews in Rosi's movie, nor any voiceovers or commentary. The images, lensed in glorious black-and-white by the director himself, and the editing, by regular cutter Fabrizio Federico (Martin Eden), are what tell us the story. Juxtapositions and motifs abound, allowing the viewer to make connections between contemporary Italy and the Roman empire, between what's happening beneath Vesuvius and events taking place around the rest of the world.

A massive tanker arrives from Odessa to distribute grain, which pours into silos like the ash that rained down upon Pompeii. A crew uses brooms to push that grain off walls of the ship's hull, just like the excavators using brushes to dust off relics at dig sites. A Japanese professor lectures on ancient wars over food and resources, while Syrian sailors speak about the war in Ukraine, as well as the one that destroyed their homeland. A newscaster talks about "baby gangs sowing panic among the citizens" of Naples, while tourists observe the panicked faces of Pompeii residents as they met their fates.

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same. As a filmmaker, Rosi acts as both guide and preservationist, making movies that may one day be uncovered like statues below ground, dug up by future archeologists trying to grasp how we lived.

Of the many memorable images in the director's latest divine work, the one that perhaps sticks out the most is of a crumbling theater where archival footage is projected on screen, including the famous Pompeii sequence from Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy. Cinema, it seems, has become a ruin as well -- a relic from another time that, like any ancient art, speaks to both past and present.