IN THE MOOD FOR LAVA
FIRE OF LOVE Director Sara Dosa honours heroes of volcanology Katia and Maurice Krafft…
From Dante’s Peak to Werner Herzog’s Into The Inferno, volcanoes have long exercised a pull on filmmakers. Director Sara Dosa reframes that magnetism on multiple fronts in Fire Of Love, a documentary brimming with elemental force, feeling and spectacle.
Love story and scientific study, mythical meditation and existential investigation, Fire Of Love focuses on husband-and-wife volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. While directing magical-realist documentary The Seer And The Unseen (2019), Dosa needed footage to portray Iceland’s volcanic origins. Her research touched on the Kraffts, who adored volcanoes and amassed swathes of footage before they died in a pyroclastic surge from Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. “The more we learned about them,” says Dosa, “the more we fell in love with them.”
The theme of love lit the film’s spark, says Dosa. “It came to life from a sentence Maurice wrote, which says, ‘Me, Katia and the volcanoes, it’s a love story.’ When I read that it was like, ‘OK, let’s make a film about a love triangle between these two humans and this force of our planet.’”
Warmly narrated by writer/ filmmaker/actor Miranda July – no
stranger to offbeat romances – Fire benefits from an immersion in archive footage, presented without distracting talking heads. Avid self-documenters, the Kraffts emerge as larger-thanlife characters, almost proto-vloggers in their awareness of the image they projected: one of fearlessness before death. As Dosa says, “I believe it was their true selves, but they understood the power of their characters to tell a greater message about the planet.”
Under Dosa’s watch, this message takes on timeless and timely implications. While her themes of respect for the planet resonate today, abstract themes of memory and myth also bubble to the surface. “Because Katia and Maurice knew they could die at any moment,” says Dosa, “I wondered if they were inscribing themselves into their own kind of myth. You know, celluloid is nearly immortal. Whereas human life is fleeting.
“Plus, they were fascinated by myth. They collected so many stories from around the world about the supernatural qualities of volcanoes. We thought about myth as similar language to scientific language, in that both science and myth are languages that speak to the unknown.”
While the Kraffts’ story builds inexorably towards what Dosa calls their “haunting” endgame, the film finds lingering value in their lives. “I feel like Katia and Maurice have shown me what it means to live a meaningful life and to die a meaningful death,” says Dosa. “They went towards what they loved with such abandon, knowing they could never fully comprehend what a volcano is. But they knew this journey towards understanding would enrich their lives with meaning.” Here, their tale burns bright once more.
‘The more we learned about them, the more we fell in love with them’ SARA DOSA
FIRE OF LOVE OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 29 JULY.