With their red knit hats and bright, warm expressions, Katia and Maurice Krafft seem every bit the unassuming couple. That simple charm obscures that the two were in fact leading volcanologists for the second half of the 20th century. After meeting at university in the 1960s, the two united over their shared love of all things volcanic. They married in 1970 and traversed the globe, studying and documenting their fiery obsession through hundreds of hours of film, and thousands of photographs. Their work produced a stream of books, educational films, and reshaped the way that the world thinks about and responds to volcanoes. In her new documentary Fire of Love (2022), Sara Dosa unfurls the Krafft’s remarkable love story in parallel to a careful study of the legacy they left behind after their deaths at the foot of Mount Unzen in 1991.
Fire of Love offers the chance to experience filmmakers in conversation. The Krafft’s original footage amounts to a holy grail of documentation. Katia and Maurice were defined by their willingness to go places no one else dared, and their footage reflects an intimacy with volcanoes I have never encountered. Apart from the wide shots of one or the other standing on the cusp of a volcanic crater, there are also a stunning array of clips that revel in the awesome beauty and power of the molten excretions. They are an endless flux of dazzling reds, yellows, and oranges. Dosa then takes this raw material and sculpts it into a tender exploration of the couples’ life together. Clever incorporations of clips from TV appearances, peers’ footage, and so forth build out a cinematic feat of pacing and editing that manages to celebrate the Krafft’s filmmaking as much as remix it.
What makes Fire of Love such a remarkably poignant experience is how present Katia and Maurice feel in each frame. Both of them crackle with personality, whether they are speaking or taking a measurement from a massive sulfuric lake. Yes, they are intense about their work, but one gets the sense that such commitment rarely hindered them from also enjoying themselves. Maurice projects gregariousness tinged with an impulsive streak. He is the one, much to Katia’s chagrin, who chose to take a rubber boat out onto the aforementioned sulfuric lake. Katie, by comparison, is a bastion of placid curiosity, the joy of each eruption reflected in her eyes and contagious smile. When they’re together, it’s effortless to comprehend why they dedicated their lives to each other. Glances and exchanges, often taking place with magma or noxious fumes blasting in the background, reveal an astonishing love.
For her part, Dosa foregrounds their self-crafted narrative without succumbing to populating the space with talking heads bloviating about the Kraffts’ contribution to volcanology. Apart from wonderful narration from Miranda July and the occasional actor reading from Maurice or Katia’s journals, her precise direction embraces the Kraffts as makers of their own legacy. Dosa seems careful to neither condemn them for the errant choice that led to their deaths nor lionize their dangerous approach to volcanology. As a direct result, Dosa delivers Fire of Love into the world as a celebration of two blisteringly unique humans who somehow found each other in the chaos of existence and built a life wholly committed to passion. Viewed in that way, Fire of Love is one of the most sweepingly romantic films I’ve encountered in recent memory, and surely the only one that also features breathtaking footage of volcanic eruptions.
There is a reading from Katia’s writing late in the film where she discusses why Maurice always walks ahead of her on their expeditions. “He is heavier,” she writes, and so therefore she knows that if he is safe walking somewhere, she “can follow.” Yes, it is specifically about navigating volcanic areas, but it struck me as a moving nod to the trust and devotion inherent in a love that deep. When she goes on to say that she follows because if he falls she “wants to be with him,” we already anticipate it is what she’ll say. It takes a couple of immense affection to dwarf a literal fiery explosion, but the Kraffts do it with style.
Fire of Love was viewed in the Festival Favorites section of SXSW 2022.
Director: Sara Dosa
Writer: Sara Dosa, Erin Casper, Jocelyne Chaput and Shane Boris
Rated: NR
Runtime: 91m
Rating: 5 out of 5
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
