“This is Katia and this is Maurice,” sound the dulcet tones of narrator Miranda July at the beginning of mesmerising National Geographic documentary Fire Of Love, which premiered at this year’s Sundance. “It’s 1991, June 2nd. Tomorrow will be their last day.”
The accompanying footage is some of the last to feature French couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, two volcanologists who were tragically killed when Japan’s Mount Unzen erupted in the summer of ‘91. Eager but unassuming, the lovers – born just 40 km from each other in the northeastern region of Alsace – died doing the very thing that brought them together in 1966. “They will leave behind samples,” continues July. “Words. Hundreds of hours of footage. Thousands of photos. And a million questions.”
In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Fire Of Love might have searched speculatively for answers: a conventional excavation of what drove the Kraffts’ intrepid impulses to the precipice of the world’s most active volcanoes. As it is, San Francisco-based filmmaker Sara Dosa opts for something far more poignant and meaningful.
In a similar vein to Jennifer Peedom’s pensive 2017 doc, Mountain, Dosa instead allows the mystery and wonder of nature’s most unruly behemoths to engulf her film. And like Peedom’s film, Fire Of Love contains some of the most breathtaking footage ever put to screen, as Dosa gazes over the Kraffts’ extensive archive – expeditions to Colombia and Zaire, Iceland and America – with a deeply spiritual eye. What unfurls is a sensitive, moving celebration of mutual, unfaltering passion: a study that straddles the planes of the educational and the ethereal.
This is nature filmmaking at its most visually and emotionally grandiose: a myriad of dazzling spectacle offering both striking close-ups of volcanoes at their most devastatingly volatile and thoughtful insight into the duo who risked everything to capture it. It’s this balance, this blend of homing in and zooming out, that gives Dosa’s film its power.
At times, Katia, a geochemist enthralled by nature’s most intricate detail, and Maurice, a geologist-cum-fearless pioneer, are charming and rather ordinary. At others, they appear to have been plucked from the pages of some unmade Wes Anderson screenplay. With their mantra of “curiosity is stronger than fear,” Fire Of Love convinces us that, in the end, they died happy.
Dir: Sara Dosa (93 mins)
Fire Of Love premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Its UK release date is currently TBC.
words GEORGE NASH
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