Sundance Film Festival 2022 Premiere – Katia and Maurice Krafft are the two French volcanologists at the center of the delightful new documentary entitled FIRE OF LOVE. How the two met is the stuff of ambiguous legend. Yet once together the two were inseparable as they traveled the world studying active volcanoes. Driven in part by scientific fascination, admiration, and ultimately the hope to save lives, the Kraffts would ultimately lose theirs during a 1991 volcanic explosion on Japan’s Mount Unzen. But director Sara Dosa isn’t here to tell the cautionary tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun. Instead, we are treated to a beguiling recounting of love wrought from a mutual fascination and tenacity whose work would ultimately save the lives of thousands.

This is a documentary so it’s no surprise that the Krafft’s sadly lost their lives. Director Dosa instead mines an astounding amount of photographs along with footage shot by the Krafft’s themselves to tell a tale of volcanic passion. We start in 1991, with footage shot hours before their deaths. Then we are pulled back to the beginning, in France. After falling head over magma in love, the two students shot off to Iceland to view their first active volcano. After their donated car broke down repeatedly before crashing, and Maurice suffered burns on account of volcanic mud, they knew their connection was etched in stone.

Like any good story, Dosa first insists that we fall in love with Katia and Maurice before asking us to join them on their journey. The stakes are very high. Yet along the way we learn of the distinction between red volcanoes and grey volcanoes. Cutting back to the copious appearances the two made on television the world over we learn that red volcanoes are the ones that everyone thinks about. Bursts of crimson earth shooting from the ground or flowing peacefully into the ocean. We are told that it is very hard to die from a red volcano. The grey ones are the killers. Narrator Miranda July pops in about this time to remind us that we “…fall for what we know. But we fall for what we don’t know even harder.”

Dosa deftly weaves a cinematic yarn from the decades of archival footage that ultimately financed the Krafft’s work that is both harrowing and hypnotic. Still, we are never once allowed to wallow in the dangers of their studies. Instead, we are invited to celebrate the dedication and excitement that both Maurice and Katia share as they traversed the globe to learn how better to predict the disasters that had claimed lives in Pompeii, Indonesia, and Washington state among others.

These were two science geeks who hungered not just for discovery, but for their mutual company. At one point it is noted the chances of these two people ever meeting. They were born in the same timeframe, in the same country, with the same rapacious interest in the same thing. How lucky were they to find one another? How lucky are we to benefit from their work?

7 Out of 10