fire of love movie review

Fire of Love

A poem of matrimony and magma, “Fire of Love” is about Katia and Maurice Krafft , a married team of volcanologist-filmmakers. The Kraffts were known for their inventive exploration and photography of active volcanoes. Their work started in the late 1960s and ended in 1991 when a pyroclastic flow on Japan’s Mt. Unzen wiped them out along with a group of 41 scientists, firefighters, and journalists. 

Note that in the preceding sentence, “short” was not preceded by “tragically.” Maurice Paul Krafft and Catherine Joséphine “Katia” Krafft were Alsacian French volcanologists who were inseparable the moment they discovered that they shared an obsession with fiery earth. They knew the risks of their chosen field and accepted them. 

“I want to get closer, right into the belly of the volcano,” Maurice once said, adding, “It will kill me one day, but that doesn’t bother me at all.” 

“It’s not that I flirt with death,” Katia said, “but at that moment, I don’t care at all.”

Their union not only produced a trove of astonishing imagery that can be endlessly reworked and put to a variety of uses, it gave any future filmmaker who wanted to retell their story a gallery of metaphors for love, passion, obsession, and commitment. From the opening images of the Kraffts driving a Jeep through snowy tundra and pausing to unstick the vehicle from an ice patch, shot after shot serves its own narrative function while seeming as if it’s also functioning as a metaphor or symbol (regardless of the Kraffts’ original intent). Films that are made this way can be endlessly re-watchable, because they don’t put too fine a point on the various possible secondary associations, instead giving the viewer mental space in which to muse and fantasize and draw their own connections.  

Directed and cowritten by  Sara Dosa (“The Last Season,” “ The Edge of Democracy “) and narrated by filmmaker-actor-artist Miranda July , “Fire of Love” is one of a vanishingly rare breed of documentary that is determined to be “total cinema,” not just capturing the facts of what happened to its subjects but creating an entire aesthetic—a vibe —around them. As directed by Dosa and nimbly cut by editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput (who have already received an award for their work here, and deserve more), “Fire of Love” is not content to toss a series of arresting images collected by other filmmakers on the screen, even though the result still would’ve been riveting if they had. 

The Kraffts were once described by a journalist as “traveling performer volcanologists,” and they liked the description and found truth in it. Dosa’s movie leans into the idea, linking them to a long tradition of naturalist filmmakers that includes their countryman Jacques Cousteau. We’re aware that the Kraffts are using their eccentric charisma and romantic mystique to get themselves (and the viewer) as close to the action as possible. Our awareness of the mechanics of their “act” is part of the show we’re watching, like the patter of a magician who talks about the history of illusions while doing tricks.

Werner Herzog told the Kraffts’ story in “ The Fire Within ” and “ Into the Inferno ,” but in a less cohesive and fully realized way. Herzog’s late-career work as a nonfiction filmmaker sometimes has a slapped-together feeling (except in “ Grizzly Man ,” a film with a brutal, telegraphed-in-advance ending that Dosa’s movie evokes). That’s never the case here. Just when the narration threatens to turn a Herzogian shade of purple, it stops short and defers to the imagery, as if trusting that whatever thoughts we might have about the Kraffts and the images they captured will be more edifying than an omniscient narrator’s attempt to sum things up for us. 

The artists have made something paradoxically unassuming yet grand—a movie with a churning, flowing, volatile life force, befitting the topic that obsessed the Kraffts. Like “ Apollo 11 ,” “ The Velvet Underground ,” “Summer of Soul” and other esteemed predecessors (including Godfrey Reggio’s visually driven, quasi-experimental documentaries) this is a nonfiction film that could be shown in IMAX and advertised as pure spectacle. This writer saw it on a laptop and was mesmerized by it, but would love to see it projected on an enormous screen someday. 

It is never more graceful and on-point than when it’s serving up a succession of nature images captured by the Kraffts: a still image of a hand caressing ripples in black earth; expressionistic shots of lava-fountains spewing; underwater images of red-hot magma extruding and then cooling and hardening. “Fire of Love” has an identity that is connected to, yet independent of, the information it delivers.  Pedro Almodovar once advised new filmmakers that it isn’t enough for a film to move: it needs to  dance . This movie dances. You could project it on the wall of a nightclub. 

The movie never succumbs to self-infatuated grandiosity, probably because it’s impossible to stare at images of the earth continually destroying and re-creating itself without realizing how small we are. “The human eye cannot see geologic time,” Krafft says at one point. “Our lives are just a blink compared to the life of a volcano.” Does that mean that the Kraffts’ great love is diminished? Probably they’d say yes; they were humble about their importance in the greater scheme. 

But directors keep making movies about them. And as the title of this one suggests, it’s not just the images of erupting and flowing and cooling lava that draws them. 

Now playing in theaters.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Miranda July as Narrator (voice)
• Katia Krafft as Self
• Maurice Krafft as Self

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‘Fire of Love’ Review: A Volcanic Romance

Sara Dosa’s new documentary chronicles the lives and deaths of the French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft.

By A.O. Scott

The subjects of Sara Dosa’s new documentary “Fire of Love” are Maurice and Katia Krafft, married French scientists who devoted their lives to the study of volcanoes. Really, though, it might be more accurate to describe the couple, who died in a volcanic eruption in 1991, as co-directors, since they were the ones who captured the most arresting images in this curious and haunting film.

Those images, still and moving, record the before, during and after of volcanic eruptions on several continents. Some of these are terrifying, as molten rock shoots skyward and clouds of ash roll down the sides of mountains. Others are eerie, capturing the glow of an active crater or the otherworldly contours of newly formed rock. The sheer existence of these photos is mind-boggling when you think about how close the people with the cameras must have been to the lava and the smoke.

The Kraffts, who grew up in Alsace, France, and met at the University of Strasbourg, were devoted to each other and smitten with Etna, Stromboli, Nyiragongo and other volatile spots. As the film tells it — and archival interviews and broadcast appearances confirm — their shared interest wasn’t just a professional matter. It was an all-consuming and ultimately fatal passion.

Maurice was a geologist and Katia a geochemist, and the difference between those disciplines is an occasional source of nerdy humor. A geologist, Maurice suggests, is someone who paddles an inflatable canoe into a lake of sulfuric acid, while a geochemist has the good sense to stay on shore taking measurements and collecting samples.

The narration, read by Miranda July, underlines temperamental contrasts between the scientists that are seemingly confirmed by the pictures. Katia, birdlike and ironical, kept track of the data and took the still photographs, while Maurice, who resembles a curly-headed lion cub, gave public lectures and wielded the movie camera.

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‘Fire of Love’ Is the Greatest Lava Story Ever Told

By David Fear

She is petite, trim, almost birdlike. He’s big, slightly lumbering, closer to a bear. Her hair is short, kept in a shaggy pixie cut. His resembles an unruly, curly mop — a Chia pet in full sprout. Both of them have very large ears. No one can remember exactly how they met; it might have been on a bench at a university, or at a movie screening, or perhaps on a blind date. What we do know is that Katia and Maurice Krafft bonded over a common obsession: volcanoes. And by the time they’d married in 1970, these two scientists had already started trotting the globe together to study these beautiful, violent natural phenomenons whenever and wherever eruptions occurred. “Certain colleagues see us as weirdos,” Katia admitted. The first couple of volcanology, however, simply recognized each other as soulmates.

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Dosa has referred to her painstakingly assembled recounting of the Kraffts’ lives as a tale of a “love triangle.” And indeed, the volcanoes act as a floating third party in their amour fou, with each new scaled peak and rockpile beguiling them separately and collectively. In the Kraffts’ minds, these were partners in crime. During a vintage TV interview, Maurice is quick to poo-poo “lazy categorizations” regarding the different volcanoes they’d visited, and claimed that each had their own distinct personality. (The movie even takes that notion one step further, giving “co-starring” credits to Mauna Loa, Nyiragongo, Una Una, Krafla, and Mt. St. Helens.) He will acknowledge, however, that you can divide volcanoes into two basic types: “red” ones, which are the result of tectonic plates moving part and are what you usually picture when someone says the word “volcano”; and “gray” ones, which happen when those plates come together and build pressure underneath the surface. The latter are explosive, ash-belching and much more dangerous. These are the ones that arouse Katia and Maurice’s interest the most. They were also play a part in the couple’s demise.

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And, of course, Dosa wants you to bask in the couple’s magma cum laude love story. “Alone, they can only dream of volcanoes,” July intones. “Together, they can reach them.” It’s possible to look at Fire of Love as the ultimate proof that there is a lid for every pot and acknowledge that for the Kraftts, lava means never having to say you’re sorry. But it’s also a way of framing a philosophy of life in which we respect and attempt to live harmoniously with the world rather than subject it to our hubris or tame it to our will. That simpatico notion fuels Katia and Maurice’s relationship as much as any physical attraction or mutual intellectual pursuit. The respect and awe they have for these forces of nature is part of the respect and awe they have for each other. It easy to think of these two as little more than self-destructive eccentrics when going in to this documentary. Spend 90 minutes with them, and you leave thinking of them as romantic heroes.

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‘Fire of Love’ Review: The Most Spectacular Volcano Footage Ever Shot Anchors an Amazing Doc About Two Volcanologists

Maurice and Katia Krafft met in 1966 and became the volcano equivalent of storm chasers. Sara Dosa's documentary about them is moving and amazing.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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At times, nothing is as gratifying to watch as a movie about obsession that lures you into sharing the obsession. “ Fire of Love ,” one of the movies that are opening the Sundance Film Festival tonight, is a documentary about an unassuming French couple, Maurice and Katia Krafft, who became the world’s most ardent volcanologists. Starting in 1966, when they met, and over the next 25 years, the two traveled to as many active volcanos as they could find, from Zaire to Colombia to Iceland to America to Japan — and when I say active, I don’t mean wisps of smoke billowing out of the crater. The Kraffts got as close as possible to the danger and spectacle of these seismic tectonic eruptions from the depths of the earth. They stood right next to gleaming rivers of lava, to massive showers of hot rocks, and recorded it all, leaving a filmed and photographic record of volcanic activity that remains unparalleled.

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Seeing that footage is a lot of what makes “Fire of Love” a spellbinding experience. Yet the film also tells the enthralling story of two unlikely lives. The Kraffts, born 40 kilometers from each other in the Alsace region of northeastern France (that the region has shifted, over the centuries, between French and German control is part of what lends it a distinctive spirit), were the homespun version of daredevil soulmates, addicted to awe and united in their fixation. The film suggests that they loved each other, in part, through their love of volcanos. And why not? “Fire of Love,” which has been directed by Sara Dosa with a discursive, let’s-try-it-on lyricism, is like one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about fearless outliers, only this one is touched with romance. (The Kraffts were, in fact, featured in Herzog’s “Into the Inferno,” a far less incendiary movie about volcano love.)

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Were the Kraffts scientists? She was a geochemist, he was a geologist, and they became global experts in the field, but they weren’t academics, and they weren’t researchers hauling their specimens back to the lab for study. The experience of being there , right on the edge of the earth’s convulsions, was their finding. They were a lot like storm chasers, and maybe like vertical-rock climbers, with more than a touch of Jacques Cousteau in their pioneering desire to film what they saw and bring it to the world. (They presented their findings in books and documentaries.)

Through it all, their connection to seeing volcanos erupt was mystical and primal, suffused with childlike wonder. They wanted to touch the uncanny, and did; volcanos were their life force. “Once you see an eruption,” says Katia, “you can’t live without it.” Dosa gained access to their massive archive of volcano footage, and it contains some of the most staggering, terrifying, and beautiful imagery of nature ever recorded. The close-ups of spewing lava are like Jackson Pollock paintings in motion. The flowing tributaries of molten lava, with a crust on top that it simultaneously melts through, look like a Biblical inferno. The oozing chunks of black rock are like something out of “The Blob.” The Kraffts, in their way, were true filmmakers. When you see a shot of one of them in protective gear, silhouetted by a shooting curtain of red-orange liquid, it’s pure sci-fi.

Do the Kraffts come off as…you know, characters ? Yes and no. They’re attractive and charismatic, but in a weirdly normal way, like a couple who could have spent their lives running a cheese shop in Alsace. Maurice is a genially bearish man, with curly brown hair, who looks like a brainier John Laroquette; Katia, with short hair and glasses and a vivacious grin, suggests a pixie version of Terry Gross. They wore their obsession on their sleeves, yet they’re winningly unpretentious and middle class about it. You would never look at them and think, “Yes, these two were religious about going to the ends of the earth to watch spewing volcanos.”

The film’s narration, which is read in spun-sugar tones of beguiling curiosity by Miranda July, says at one point that “Katia and Maurice were into volcanology because they were disappointed in humanity.” They had grown up in the rubble of postwar France, but the protest fervor of the ’60s didn’t incite them; it alienated them. And early in the film, we learn something about them that makes us suck in our breath. Miranda July says, “It’s 1991. June 2. Tomorrow will be their last day.” The two are headed for another volcano stakeout (of Mount Unzen in Japan), and it’s clear what we’re being told: that this is the one that killed them. That stunningly ominous fact sets the stakes for the entire movie. Maurice and Katia always knew they were risking their lives. In an early foray, the skin on Maurice’s leg was burned off by 140-degree mud — a baptism of fire. But from the start their mantra was (in Katia’s words), “Curiosity is stronger than fear.”

One way that Maurice and Katia weren’t conventional scientists is that they rejected the scientific community’s minute classification system for volcanos. Their take was: Each volcano is unique. But they did have their own classification system. For them, there were two kinds of volcanos: red and grey. The red kind are the ones that spew showers of lava and look perilous. The gray kind are the ones that spew impossibly gigantic clouds of smoke (like the famous images from Mount St. Helens), one of which that we see literally resembles an atomic-bomb cloud. The smoke volcanos may look less dangerous than the liquid fire ones, but, in fact, they’re much more dangerous. And the Kraffts, over time, moved from seeking out the red to the gray. We hear lethal stories of what the gray volcanos can do, the smoke exploding like an avalanche, often stretching far beyond the area it had been predicted to reach. And that’s what happened at Mount Unzen. Maurice and Katia stood several kilometers away from the volcano, but that wasn’t far enough. It swallowed them up. But “Fire of Love” is a movie powerful enough to convince you that they died happy.

Reviewed at Digital Arts (Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition), Jan. 13, 2022. Running time: 93 MIN.

• Production: A Submarine production. Producers: Shane Boris, Ina Fichman, Sara Dosa. Executive producers: Greg Boustead, Jessica Harrop, Josh Braun.
• Crew: Director: Sara Dosa. Editors: Erin Casper, Jocelyne Chaput Music: Nicolas Godin.
• With: Kaurice Krafft, Katia Krafft.

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‘fire of love’: film review | sundance 2022.

Sara Dosa's Sundance-opening documentary explores the life and death of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who dedicated themselves and their marriage to chasing eruptions around the globe.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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One of the most venerable of documentary genres focuses on eccentrics whose commitment to various pursuits within nature leads them either up to or past the brink of death. With recent examples like Grizzly Man , Free Solo and The Alpinist , it’s a genre that comes with the built-in friction that as compelling as the subjects’ behavior might be, romanticizing that behavior might be dangerous.

In some ways, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love , one of the opening films of this year’s virtual Sundance , feels like that genre’s apotheosis.

Fire of Love

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)

Director: Sara Dosa

The documentary tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, married volcanologists who bonded over their childhood fascination with volcanoes, spent their lives chasing volcanic eruptions around the globe and, yes, died together while studying an active volcano. Accompanied by a dreamy soundtrack and philosophically flowery narration by Miranda July, it’s a doomed love story on every level, a gorgeous collage of a film in which romance, scientific inquiry and death do a 93-minute dance.

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Early in their shared career — Katia acted as geo-chemist, Maurice as geologist — the Kraffts realized that the best way to support that career required publicity. So they endeavored to document all of their adventures on a cinematic level that went beyond intellectual inquiry. They made movies. They did speaking tours. They made TV appearances. As a result, the couple left behind hundreds of hours of still photography and movie footage, which Dosa uses as the basis for her assemblage, along with myriad interviews they conducted to promote their endeavors.

The footage is astonishing, a record of the Earth tearing itself apart and reforming, with billowing plumes of smoke, torrential downpours of flaming boulders and river after river of glowing lava, sometimes hardening in to rock, sometimes meeting the sizzling barrier of the sea and sometimes flowing freely, terrifyingly. It’s hypnotic — though many things become hypnotic when you set a montage to a track by Air — and alien and undeniably sensual. Freud would have a field day with the intersection of the erotic and near-death that come together in these sequences, which Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput edit with an unerring sense of nature’s own percussion.

The footage, incidentally, has all been restored, but not over-polished, and I can only assume it would look gorgeous on the big screen. Without relying on IMAX-like technology, the documentary offers the sensation of literal, death-defying immersion, augmented by the burble of a molten stream, the hiss of a newly formed pumice island, the tinkling of shattered obsidian in the sound design.

Embedded within the footage and the staged interviews are glimpses of a relationship. As we see it, Maurice was playful and daring, charging forward with reckless abandon. But even if Katia comes across as quieter and more cautious, there she is at his side in situations most people would flee. We don’t have to see them holding hands or cuddling or really being affectionate at all to see them as a couple. At every step, the Kraffts recognize that they’re transitory interlopers surrounded by something eternal, but through their footage and in their deaths, they become eternal as well.

Dosa eschews new filming and fresh talking-head interviews that might have given more practical insight into the Kraffts and their relationship, but the dreamy tone is enhanced by voiceover offering a sense of high-minded omniscience via lines like “Together, they’re there for the volcano, who is indifferent in the face of their adulation.” Yes, it’s a little (or a lot) pretentious, but July’s bordering-on-deadpan delivery somehow grounds it in an acceptance that what their love and work represented is more important than something as terrestrial as “reality.” And maybe the voiceover and narrated excerpts from their writing aren’t so much “pretentious” as “French” and stemming from a ’60s and ’70s artistic tradition — not confrontational enough to be classified as New Wave, but in that vicinity.

The documentary is poetic and flowery, but it’s hardly without a sense of humor, like the dashes of animation (by Lucy Munger) that Dosa uses when the footage lacks connective tissue. It also isn’t without some measure of incredulity, as in an episode where Maurice goes paddling out into a lake of sulphuric acid with very little scientific motivation, leaving Katia back on the shore.

That incident is a key piece of the underlying story here — one that traces how the Kraffts’ interest in volcanoes, which initially stems from loneliness the documentary attributes to growing up in post-WWII Alsace, progressed from giddy curiosity into a more humanist attempt to advance the study of early warning signs in order to prevent mass casualties from eruptions. Whether that plays as an explanation or just an excuse probably depends on your perspective.

By genre standards, theirs becomes more of a noble death and less one brought about exclusively by personal compulsion — the need to hang out with bears, the need to climb a mountain in a particularly idiosyncratic way. That helps Fire of Love stand out thematically in addition to its aesthetic pleasures. Volcanoes, the documentary reminds us over and over again, can end life and they can bring new life, and that’s what Fire of Love does for its genre as well.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition) Production Companys: Sandbox Films, Intuitive Pictures, Cottage M Director: Sara Dosa Writer: Sara Dosa, Erin Casper, Jocelyn Chaput, Shane Boris Producers: Sara Dosa, Shane Boris, Ina Fichman Executive producers: Greg Boustead, Jessica Harrop Editors: Erin Casper, Jocelyn Chaput Narrator: Miranda July Composer: Nicolas Godin 91 minutes

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Review: As both a doc about volcanoes and a scientists’ romance, ‘Fire of Love’ kicks ash

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The visually entrancing volcano documentary “Fire of Love” chronicles a magnificent obsession and might even make that obsession your own. It didn’t have to work terribly hard in my case. I was already a budding volcanophile when I decided, at age 8, that I’d never seen anything more beautiful than the geysers of lava raining down on Kilauea, a hyperactive Hawaiian monster that I soon declared my favorite volcano in the world. (It was one of several contenders.) I wasn’t much older when I learned that one of Kilauea’s longest recorded eruptions actually started the day I was born, one of those funny coincidences that felt eerily prophetic at the time.

My 8-year-old self, no less than my present-day one, would have thrilled to the majestic images in “Fire of Love,” which deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible. (The movie is opening in theaters this week; it’ll be available on Disney+ later this year.) The images were filmed by fearless French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who pursued their shared passion to the ends (or at least the edges) of the Earth, where the crust fissures and rock slides against molten rock.

Katia, a geochemist, and Maurice, a geologist, met as students in 1966, married in 1970 and spent the rest of their lives visiting active volcanoes all over the world, marching right up to flowing lava rivers and smoking craters and filming what they saw.

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They are the subjects of this movie and, to a significant degree, its authors. Starting with a gorgeous fire-and-ice prologue in which we see the Kraffts pushing a none-too-reliable truck up a snowy Icelandic mountainside, “Fire of Love” draws on hundreds of hours’ worth of 16-millimeter footage that they shot over more than two decades.

And like a scientist making the most of an incomplete but invaluable fossil record, director Sara Dosa (“The Seer and the Unseen”) forges a clear and absorbing narrative path through the Kraffts’ archive. Her connective tools include Miranda July’s poetic narration, Lucy Munger’s inventive animated segments, Patrice LeBlanc’s meticulous sound design and, above all, Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput’s propulsive editing, which won a prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. (Casper and Chaput are also credited as writers on the film, along with Dosa and Shane Boris.)

“Fire of Love” thus wants us to see the world and its wonders as Katia and Maurice Krafft saw them, to reap the benefits of their expertise and share in their astonishment. (The emotional swells of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” and Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” help direct our awe, as does an exquisite score by Nicolas Godin of the French duo Air.)

As its title makes clear, the movie also seeks to cast the Kraffts as well-matched leads in a most unusual love story, one that found its grandest consummation in jaw-dropping eruptions of lava and ash.

“Fire of Love” is sometimes a romantic comedy, predicated on the affable TV-friendly chemistry between the grinning, gregarious Maurice and the petite, birdlike Katia. By the end, when it recounts its subjects’ deaths in the 1991 eruption of Mt. Unzen in Japan, the story has morphed into something more somber, though the Kraffts themselves might have stopped short of calling it a tragedy.

Their lifelong devotion to “a kamikaze existence in the beauty of volcanic things” feels at once radical and strangely familiar, given the recent glut of documentaries about thrill seekers and extreme sports aficionados, like “The Rescue” and “Free Solo.” (Any number of Werner Herzog films come to mind, including his 2016 volcano documentary, “Into the Inferno,” which features a segment on the Kraffts.)

Like some of the subjects of those earlier works, Katia and Maurice chased their calling with the intensity of true believers, as well as an undisguised impatience with anyone or anything else that might make demands of their time.

“We no longer see the world with all its mediocrities,” Katia is heard saying at one point. Her husband shared her view of volcanoes as superior company, a refuge from the tedium of human concerns, but he also possessed a reckless streak that eluded even her.

In one of the film’s more harrowing episodes, shot in Indonesia in 1971, Maurice incurs Katia’s wrath by sailing a rubber dinghy into an enormous lake of highly concentrated sulfuric acid. The footage of that adventure is exquisite and unnerving, especially when the camera pulls back to reveal Maurice and a colleague seated in their vulnerable little craft, wreathed in the toxic mists of a lake that could eat them alive.

Like many other images here — including a shot that finds Katia straddling the edge of a crater, then traces a downward arc into the billowing smoke below — this scene shows compositional elegance and an intuitive sense of visual scale.

Despite this, Maurice at one point states: “I am not a filmmaker. I am a wandering volcanologist forced to make films in order to wander.” That he may have been; to fund their many expeditions, he and Katia mined every possible revenue stream, publishing books of their photographs and touring the lecture circuit. But the visions unleashed in “Fire of Love” suggest that they took their art as seriously as they took their science.

July’s narration works beautifully in concert with the images, often calling our attention to specific details within the frame and questioning the motives and circumstances that might have produced them.

In the absence of conventional talking heads, her thoughtful, melancholy phrasings achieve a lyricism that harks back to a classical tradition of French documentary filmmaking. She’s a good fit for this story, given the wistful romanticism and searching, adventurous spirit of her own work as an actor, artist and filmmaker. She also steers the movie through a crucial tonal and moral transition.

“Volcanoes must destroy to create, but must this unruly cycle take human life?” July asks, articulating the Kraffts’ horror at the death tolls exacted by the eruptions of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and, especially, Nevado del Ruiz in 1985 , which killed more than 20,000 people in Armero, Colombia.

Their subsequent determination to sound the alarm in hot spots around the world, to use their scientific authority and knowledge to save lives, granted new meaning to their own lives and deaths; it also separates Dosa’s film from some of those other docs about nature-loving daredevils.

The fire of Katia and Maurice Krafft’s obsession consumed them, in no small part, because it ultimately restored their kinship with humanity.

‘Fire of Love’

Rating: PG, for thematic material including some unsettling images, and brief smoking Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Playing: Starts July 6 at AMC Sunset 5, Los Angeles

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‘Fire of Love’ Review: A Molten Love Triangle Between Married Volcanologists and Their Subject

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Neon and National Geographic Documentary Films releases the film in theaters on Wednesday, July 6.

Sara Dosa’s “ Fire of Love ” is a documentarian’s dream. With a truly amazing trove of archival footage taken by married volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, the movie is, seemingly, essentially handed to them. However, that surely didn’t make piecing together this vivid and soaringly heart-tugging documentary a simple task. The filmmakers have restored and re-assembled endless reels and dozens of hours of film and video footage dating back to the late 1960s into a witty portrait, aided amply by appropriately monotone and poetic narration from filmmaker Miranda July, and a soundtrack of go-to, let’s-run-toward-our-future pop classics like Brian Eno’s electronic anthem “The Big Ship.” At an economical 90-minute running time, “Fire of Love” packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired.

“Fire of Love” allows you to contemplate life lived at the edge of the abyss, at the precipice of spewing lava and 1200-degree Celsius heat. It’s that pyroclastic connection that brings together twin flames Katia (who calls herself the “bird”) and Maurice (him, the “elephant seal”), who met on a park bench in 1966, got married, and saved up enough cash to honeymoon in Stromboli, an island off the north coast of Sicily that’s home to three active volcanoes. Then they made a career out of their fascination, making their first big expedition to Mount Nyiragongo in the Congo, and gaining notoriety for often being the first at an active volcano. Two decades later, in 1991, they died unexpectedly, standing next to each other, amid an eruption on Mount Unzen in Japan, Maurice’s watch permanently stopped at 4:18 p.m.

“Americans would call us freelancers. We are more like traveling performers,” Katia says at one point in the movie, which, along with doubling as an astounding nature documentary on its own terms, is also a wry portrait of a marriage between two people always keeping each other on their toes. The Kraffts’ obsession with volcanoes almost triangulates their love story, with their subject becoming the third point in a, shall we say, gushingly romantic trifecta. July’s narration — penned by director Dosa with Erin Casper, Jocelyne Caput, and Shane Boris — idealizes and even anthropomorphizes the volcanoes in the very same way. Words applied to their smoldering immensity include “infant” (referring to a burgeoning one), “parent” (referring to the mother one), “friend” (because the volcanoes certainly are, at least to the Kraffts), and then “fever”-ish, “indifferent,” and otherwise. The volcanoes — with the force of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 alone the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima — are never not cast as agents of malice. But it’s hard not to find them adorable in the true sense of the term through the viewpoint of the Kraffts.

Director Dosa stumbled upon the Kraffts while making her previous movie, “The Seer and the Unseen,” a magical-realist documentary about an Icelandic woman who communicates with spirits through nature (not unlike, to a less spiritual degree, what the Kraffts were up to). The Kraffts were highly aware of their public image, and so there is no shortage of irreverent material and documentation of them at work, on the side of a volcano, or in between on lecture tours. Throughout their run, they were celebrities in France, which meant a surfeit of footage was accessible in public archives, in addition to the finely preserved, grainily beautiful reels ensconced at an archival house in France.

This is a quintessentially French story about French people, which means it’s filled with plenty of French pop tunes and, visible or not, references to French New Wave cinema (there’s a “Jules and Jim”-ness to their love affair with volcanoes, and a Jacques Cousteau quirkiness to the edit).

“Fire of Love” doesn’t exactly have a narrative throughline, as editors Casper and Caput are mostly collaging a shaggy and meandering (but never dull) portrait. And while the Kraffts as people remain somewhat opaque in this film, that’s likely by design, as they were meticulous yet self-aware about their public image, which had to have meant preserving a private one. The 16mm footage that forms the basis of the movie is astounding even on a small screen, as, at one point, Katia perches on the mouth of an exploding void, insulated by aluminum and asbestos. It’s the kind of footage undreamable then and even today without a drone to do the cinematographic work.

Ultimately, “Fire of Love” acquires a ticking-clock, lump-in-the-throat inevitability as we inch closer to the ’90s, and to the seething mountain in Japan that would eventually claim the Kraffts’ lives. Dosa’s film does not linger too closely on their deaths, but instead exuberantly celebrates their lives, forgoing any talking heads or outside counsel to focus squarely on what’s surely the most unusual married couple in documentary history.

“Fire of Love” world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. 

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‘Fire of Love’ Film Review: Married Scientists Devote Their Lives to Each Other, and to Volcanoes

The nature-documentary footage of lava is awe-inspiring, as is the love story of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft

The most impressive spectacle film of the summer hasn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars nor has it employed state-of-the-art CGI to invent bizarre new worlds and fantastical creatures. It’s Sara Dosa’s documentary “Fire of Love,” an overwhelming visceral experience culled together from live and breathtaking footage filmed at active volcanos by daredevil volcanologists who tragically died decades ago.

“Fire of Love” tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, who fell in love over their shared love of volcanoes and dedicated their entire lives to getting up close and personal with magma flows, acid lakes and other natural phenomena that boggle and terrify the mind — and the body doesn’t much care for them either; you can literally see the flesh peeling off of Maurice’s leg after he idly stands in boiling mud.

The Kraffts were no mere hobbyists: They were leading figures in volcanology, filming extensive documentary footage, writing detailed books and appearing on television to expand mainstream awareness of the wonders and dangers of volcanos.

It’s easy to see why they were media darlings. Their quirky sense of humor, charming outfits and whimsical footage would make them right at home in a Wes Anderson movie. One half expects Steve Zissou to show up at any moment and make things awkward.

What’s more, the Kraffts had no interpersonal conflicts to speak of. “Fire of Love” isn’t interested in inflating the drama of their lives. The tense, enigmatic whispers of Miranda July supply all the tension Dosa’s film needs in the quieter moments. If anything, the Kraffts even seem peaceful about their seemingly inevitable fate, speaking candidly about the very likely scenario that a volcano will probably kill them someday, probably at the same time, but that it’s the only way they’d want to go.

And although we learn very quickly that the Kraffts would perish suddenly at the Mount Unzen eruption in Japan in 1991, that information does not undermine the death-defying wonder of the documentary’s imagery. Hypnotic footage of molten rock undulates like an H.R. Giger creation, with unthinkably gigantic walls of magma towering over the pair of scientists. To watch “Fire of Love” is to take a sight-seeing expedition through the pits of hell, but with infectiously cheerful tour guides who’ll make you stop worrying and love the lava bombs.

It’s unexpectedly easy to get wrapped up in the cheerful, albeit shockingly dangerous pursuits of Katia and Maurice Krafft, so you might as well do it. “Fire of Love” has nothing but affection for these two thrill-seeking scientists, who initially view modern society as nothing more than a means to their end. They study volcanoes, they return to France to make enough money so they study more volcanoes. Rinse, repeat.

The Kraffts seem truly alive when they are hopping on melting boulders. Maurice even fantasizes about building a canoe sturdy enough to travel 15km down a lava flow, which probably wasn’t a very good idea but would surely have looked marvelous in his camera.

The couple’s awe-inspiring footage would be a gift to any filmmaker, and hours could no doubt be spent just watching the world’s largest and deadliest lava lamps bubble, spill, crackle and steam. Director Dosa (“The Seer & The Unseen”) understands that romance is fundamental to elevating “Fire of Love” beyond a gorgeous nature film. She savvily blends an eccentric romance and environmental study with a satisfying character arc, in which the Kraffts gradually recognize the importance of using their obsessive expertise to save human lives from bureaucracies that had done little (or nothing) to successfully predict or evacuate communities from impending doom.

“Fire of Love” is a wholly satisfying, overwhelming documentary, as disarming as it is explosive. To know the Kraffts is to share their lava affair, and sharing their journey brings you face-to-face with alarming majesties, more striking and more profound than any of the fictional marvels you’ve seen in recent memory — maybe, ever, even.

“Fire of Love” opens Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

• AV Undercover

Fire Of Love is packing heat as well as heart

Sara dosa's gorgeous and affecting documentary filters the beauty and danger of the natural world through two volcanologists' marriage.

The most enchanting American nonfiction offering at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, director Sara Dosa’s Fire Of Love is a one-of-a-kind story of both science and romance, a movie which captures the overlapping unpredictability and ineffable beauty of both volcanoes and human bonds, and the unknown length of fuse which each ultimately possess. Positively swollen with vulnerability in addition to an infectious curiosity about the world, it’s the type of film which leaves the trajectory of your day inarguably changed—colors a little brighter, feelings a bit rawer, reflections a bit heavier.

More than 15 years on from the groundbreaking, Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Planet Earth series, nature documentaries are at this point their own lucrative sub-genre. The least demanding of this lot do little other than forcibly drag a viewer’s attention away from concrete castles and human endeavors, and even absent any animals (cuddly or otherwise), it’s fairly easy to envision Fire Of Love being packaged, in simple and perfunctory fashion, as just another exploration of the natural world’s inherent wonders.

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Instead the movie, narrated by Miranda July and constructed around hours of jaw-dropping, never-before-seen 16mm footage, undertakes a more substantive interrogation of nature and humankind’s relationship with it. At the film’s center are Maurice and Katia Krafft, pioneering married French volcanologists who studied, photographed and recorded lava flows all across the globe throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

After some biographical set-up and a touching presentation of their courtship, Fire Of Love settles into a steady occupational groove. The science presented here is interesting and informative without ever being overwhelming; broadly speaking, volcanic classifications are basically distilled down to eruptions of red lava (which are basaltic, land-creating and thus friendly) and grey plumes (which are more deadly), which helps give an audience some context for the footage it’s watching.

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As the pair become more successful within their field, the Kraffts funnel most of their money back into traveling the world, exhaustively chronicling gaseous emissions and other hard data to devise an effective warning system to flag pending eruptions and evacuate endangered populations. Maurice, who is shown in his own way to be the ultimate independent filmmaker, also becomes fixated on the idea of sailing and floating in sulphuric lakes, and even kayaking down lava flows, which sounds like the type of thing Jackass filmmaker Jeff Tremaine might have bookmarked on his computer.

If this intersection of material and subjects all sounds like a magnet for Werner Herzog, who has long been fascinated with colorful characters and the extremes of Mother Earth, that’s understandable. Herzog has actually trained his eye on volcanoes a number of times previously, in everything from the short film La Soufrière to Encounters At The End Of The World , Into The Inferno (which actually featured a segment on the Kraffts, including footage they shot) and even the narrative feature Salt And Fire .

The most apt point of comparison from Herzog’s filmography to Fire Of Love , though, may actually be Grizzly Man , which is similarly interested in examining the brutal intractability of nature, but using that as a way to better understand human feeling, choice, and action—especially those that seem radical or dangerous to most people.

To be fair, Dosa doesn’t share Herzog’s decidedly grim worldview. And her film lacks, in the form of Grizzly Man ’s Timothy Treadwell, a figure whose therapeutic soliloquies, imagined conversations, and self-pitying and paranoia-tinged rants clearly put him at odds with modern society. Fire Of Love has no anger, nor agitation. It is the flip-side opposite, a movie of embraced serenity. Still, the Kraffts (especially Maurice) were in some ways similarly obstinate figures. Their tolerance of increased risks was simply a reflection of the life value they felt they accrued from the beauty of witnessing volcanoes up close.

There are many other similarities between the two movies, too—from their foundational reliance on self-captured footage to their overall ambitiousness. As with Herzog, Dosa shows a deft touch in tackling esoteric ideas, translating philosophical weightiness into not just relatable but highly poignant reflections on shared universal truths, no matter what someone’s broader relationship may be with nature.

Acquired for release by National Geographic Documentary Films and Neon following an intense post-Sundance bidding war, Fire Of Love deservedly picked up the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the festival. Much of the archival footage itself is incredible, and the film would exude a woozy, mesmeric hold on a purely visual level even if it merely presented as a talking-head guided tour through the very unusual lives of its interesting subjects. As a self-taught videographer, that’s how keen of an eye Maurice Krafft had, but under Dosa’s guidance, editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput shape this footage into something special.

The manner in which the film frames the trajectory of its subjects’ work is masterful, and the pair’s intuitive understanding of the Kraffts’ two different personalities is also evident in editorial choices within some of the movie’s on-location volcano footage, which deepens the depicted relationship between Maurice and Katia. Abetting this lovingly curated look at soul-matched affinities is a wonderful score from composer (and Air member) Nicolas Godin, which further buoys Dosa’s inspired choice to bring on July for ruminative narration.

Each of these technical pieces, by itself, is superb. But the sum total result is a gorgeous cinematic collage, and something beautifully, unexpectedly affecting—a movie that eschews any traditional power-grabs at sentimentality, and instead takes hold of one’s heart from a surprising angle.

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Review: In ‘Fire of Love,’ the mysterious alchemy of romance

This image released by National Geographic shows Katia Krafft wearing an aluminized suit as she stands near lava burst at Krafla Volcano, Iceland, in a scene from the documentary “Fire of Love.” (National Geographic via AP)

This image released by National Geographic shows Maurice Krafft, left, and Katia Krafft in a scene from the documentary “Fire of Love.” (National Geographic via AP)

This image released by National Geographic shows Maurice Krafft, left, and Katia Krafft in a scene from the documentary “Fire of Love.” (INA/National Geographic via AP)

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Rarely have the conditions for love been less hospitable than in Sara Dosa’s documentary “Fire of Love.” Yet here, amid shifting tectonics and quaking craters, French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft forge a strangely rock-steady romance.

“Fire of Love,” excavates their unique story, and the jaw-dropping footage the Kraffts left behind, in a film exploding with awe for the mysterious alchemies of love and obsession.

The Kraffts were prominent scientists in the ‘70s and ‘80s whose passion and occasional red knit hats made them a bit like the Cousteaus of the volcano world. Like that underwater explorer, the Kraffts also picked up filmmaking to chronicle their investigations — which often drew them, like moths to the flame, perilously close to not-at-all-dormant volcanoes. They died in 1991 in a cascading gray cloud on Japan’s Mount Unzen, leaving behind hundreds of hours of footage, and as narrator Miranda July says early in the film, a million questions.

Maurice, a gregarious geologist, and Katia, a more reserved geochemist, were brought together by their mutual infatuation for volcanoes. After marrying, they decided not to have children and instead dedicated themselves to being, as Maurice terms it, “volcano runners.” They travel from active volcano to active volcano, living according to the Earth’s rhythms. With a wry smile, they confess many of their colleagues view them as weirdos.

“If I could eat rocks, I’d stay on the volcano and never come down,” Maurice says proudly in one TV interview.

Dosa uses July’s narration to frame the Kraffts’ story with a playful sense of wonder and whimsy — a sometimes overly intrusive, too neatly packaged device in a film where what’s on screen is so overwhelmingly powerful that it might not need the extra layer.

Again and again, we see the couple traversing charred alien landscapes with geysers of spewing lava. Their protective outfits are a little nutty, too, like props from an old science-fiction film or something left over from the henchmen of a Bond villain. But with rivers of red all around, they are almost at play — wild silhouettes dancing on the precipice. When set to Brian Eno’s beguiling “The Big Ship,” the imagery isn’t hellish but heavenly.

On one volcano, Maurice fries an egg on the hot ground. On another, he paddles an inflatable raft over a steaming lake of acid. Katia objects to that gambit but they are resolutely inseparable. Still, if “Fire of Love” is principally a love story, the chemistry we see between them isn’t the sort that makes you swoon. It’s easy to wonder if what binds them together isn’t so much love as mutual obsession. They both burn with a red-hot desire less for each other than to be as close to the volcano as possible. Are they chasing life, or death? Maurice calls it “a kamikaze existence.”

But what’s unknowable is also at the heart of “Fire of Love,” a movie about two people not afraid but intoxicated by forces far larger than they are. Katia and Maurice are, she says, “like flies in a saucepan that’s boiling over.” And it’s their contagious sense of awe for nature that keeps the flames of “Fire of Love” smoldering.

“Fire of Love,” a Neon release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic material including some unsettling images, and brief smoking. Running time: 93 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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Fire of Love Reviews

There are no words other than fascinating, beautiful, and entrancing to describe Sara Dosa’s documentary about Katia and Maurice Krafft.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 8, 2024

It is worth seeing primarily if The Fire Within is unavailable and/or as a lesser companion piece to Herzog’s masterful approach to the same basic story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2024

Dosa focuses on this sense of dual devotion – not just the devotion between Katia and Maurice but also their joint devotion to volcanology. It is the documentary’s most intriguing theme, and it helps to elevate Fire of Love

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Fire of Love succeeds in keeping the spirit and passion of Maurice and Katia alive...

Full Review | Jun 10, 2024

Captures both the unique personalities at its center and the way that passion — for a person or for your work — can easily consume you if you let it.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Fire of Love is born out of passion. The film’s narration is romantic, merely a reflection of the awe Maurice and Katia have for volcanoes. It’s a love that can be understood by anyone who loves something unbridled adoration.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

The Kraffts brought savoir faire to that most philosophical and visually impressive of science experiments, the leap into the volcano against a backdrop of molten orange.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Viewing Fire of Love could simply inspire feelings of amazement at several places...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2023

The two love stories woven throughout the narrative—one between Katia and Maurice, the other between the Kraffts and the volcanoes they strove to understand—provide its fiery emotional core.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 21, 2023

Sara Dosa's celebratory portrait expertly weaves together this archive, but is also filled with lovely cinematic touches of its own, from Miranda July's poetic narration to the quirky animated sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 9, 2023

Sara Dosa’s documentary is a celebration of the lives and work of a married team of volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who spend years filming and recording volcanic eruptions.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 3, 2023

So much of this doc involves the filmmakers trying to make sense of and figure out who they are only from whatever archival footage they can find. This is exceptional feat to begin with, sorting through all of it...

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 30, 2022

It’s also a beautiful love story about two people who shared a passion for exploring and for each other.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2022

Watching this gave me the weird sensation that the world was a stage for White people and the local non-white people are just background players. The Kraffts died in Japan but no Japanese voices are heard and no Japanese volcanologist died.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 26, 2022

Fire of Love is presented in such a way that it feels like an homage to French New Wave films both in its looser structure and in its editing choices.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2022

This movie serves as a fitting tribute to the lives, careers and legacy of the Kraffts, as well as their love for each other and their dedication to the study of volcanoes.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Dec 13, 2022

An extremely existential and somewhat fitting statement on how the Kraffts lived, venturing towards the unknown rather than running from it, all experienced in the stunning documentary, Fire of Love.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 10, 2022

Sara Dosa's voice, on the other hand, does not interrupt her function as a second-hand chronicler. One could even say that her informational task sometimes degrades the climax of her images. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

Volcanoes are amazing and terrifying. This doc shows that, and the special kind of love it takes to make this your life’s passion with someone else.

Full Review | Nov 30, 2022

Straying from a purely scientific outlook, Fire of Love reaches an epic spiritual dimension that at times is reminiscent of the great Werner Herzog... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 29, 2022

The Most Moving Film of the Year Is a Documentary About Volcanoes

Fire of Love isn’t your typical nature film; it’s also a tragic love story.

Fire of Love , a documentary about two volcanologists, begins on a tundra. They’re en route to yet another volcano but there’s no boiling lava in sight, no steaming geysers—just mounds of icy slush and wind-sculpted snowdrifts making the trek as challenging as possible.

Yet that’s the charm of Fire of Love : Even without a volcano onscreen, the boldness of the two tiny humans at its center is striking enough. The film, rolling out in select theaters this month , follows Maurice and Katia Krafft, a married French couple who spent the 1970s and ’80s studying, as the movie puts it, “how the Earth’s heart beats.” The film draws from about 200 hours of breathtaking expedition footage the Kraffts accumulated, books and journal entries they wrote, and interviews they gave. Narrated by the filmmaker and actor Miranda July, Fire of Love offers a bonanza of stunning images and fascinating insight into the workings of volcanoes, tracing how the Kraffts gathered their findings through meticulous research and hands-on analysis.

But Fire of Love is as much a tragedy as it is a marvel. In its opening minutes, July’s ruminative voice-over warns the viewer of the Kraffts’ eventual deaths at the base of Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991, casting a melancholic pall over the narrative to come. Maurice and Katia’s courtship is depicted through whimsical yet wistful animated sequences; the unusual approach matches their unusual, even mystical, relationship as two people who seemed destined to live and die together. Throughout Fire of Love , the director Sara Dosa regards the Kraffts with both reverence and trepidation, translating their tale into a singular fable about doomed love and the allure of the unknown. The result is more than a mere nature documentary. It is one of the most moving and mesmerizing films of the year, a meditation on the wonders of nature and human curiosity.

Read: 16 indie films to get excited about this year

After all, the Kraffts left behind a treasure trove of footage that captured their personalities. The pair had a knack for stylish shooting. Maurice was the videographer, tracking movement and scale with French New Wave whip zooms; Katia, the photographer, took precise pictures of the smallest details. The editing transforms these artifacts into a ravishing collage, while the film’s rollicking score makes even a shot of a boulder tumbling down a hill feel climactic. By treating the Kraffts’ cache of images as cinema, Fire of Love gives the audience a chance to see volcanoes the way the couple did: as works of art.

The Kraffts also had a mischievous flair for the dramatic. They often posed before walls of fire, beside rivers of lava, or on the lips of volcanoes, as if daring the viewer to reach into the screen and pull them back from the edge of the apparent abyss. July’s raspy narration is just as cheeky; she sometimes sounds like she’s responding to Katia and Maurice directly, gently teasing them for how affectionate they are toward their scorching subjects. Fire of Love skillfully weaves these eccentric flourishes into its thoughtful examination of the Kraffts’ devotion to volcanoes. It plays up the otherworldliness of the images they captured, juxtaposing them against the couple’s deeply human desire to understand what they love.

Read: The volcanologist’s paradox

As the film goes on, it subtly shifts from a playful legend of two quirky scientists to a more somber, philosophical contemplation of their shared love. The volcanoes were apathetic toward the Kraffts, of course, yet the Kraffts became more audacious in their quest to solve the mysteries they held. They stopped studying milder red volcanoes, running toward gray volcanoes—ones that erupt in plumes of ash and smoke that often kill humans—instead. “It will kill me one day,” Maurice says in an interview, “but that doesn’t bother me at all.” The film seems to endorse his confidence, applying his voice-over often onto gorgeous shots of flowing lava.

But it also lingers on the duo’s last moments, tracing the way they got closer and closer to Mount Unzen, seeking a better view, a better angle of the explosion they knew was coming. Were they fearless, or had they become too enamored of volcanos to fully consider the danger of their job? What kept them going on their noble search for comprehension, when they knew it would probably end their lives? The film doesn’t deign to offer answers. But it still understands that there was something magical and haunting about the way the Kraffts chose to live—and by extension, to die.

I’ve seen Fire of Love multiple times now, and each viewing has yielded a detail I’d missed. Late in the film, for instance, I caught a glimpse of bandages on Katia’s left leg that I definitely didn’t notice during my first watch at Sundance. The shot plays for barely a second. Yet it made me wonder how she got the injury, whether it was a souvenir from an expedition, a foreshadowing of the danger to come. It inspired a fresh curiosity, even an appetite for another rewatch. Perhaps this same desire to observe and understand as much as possible was what drove the Kraffts to trek up volcanoes again and again—the experience made new each time, no matter how many climbs had come before.

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Fire Of Love Review

29 Jul 2022

Fire Of Love

The thing that French volcanologist Maurice Krafft worried about most in his lifetime was that “the spectacle could vanish”; that all the wonders of the natural world he witnessed would fade from view. He and his wife Katia saw things more beautiful and dangerous than any of us could dream of, visiting every possible volcano to better comprehend the natural forces that frame our world. The couple filmed everything: eruptions, discoveries, each other — stolen moments, immortalised so they could always hold on to them. It is a poignant and illuminating tribute to these lost pioneers, to have all of it brought to life in Sara Dosa’s documentary.

A beautiful distillation of two peoples' determined lives and loves.

The filmmaker — whose academic background in cultural anthropology is of clear and great benefit here — fills the gaps in the Kraffts’ hundreds of hours of 16mm footage, all of which was silent when she found it. Dosa recruits fellow filmmaker Miranda July to narrate the film, reading a poetic script co-written by Dosa. It’s both in the questions July-as-narrator asks of the Kraffts, and the emotion July-as-herself gives with her performance that has a tender, almost ASMR quality to it. “Understanding is love’s other name,” she whispers, as Maurice and Katia fall in love in a montage scored by Brian Eno’s lush, romantic 1975 song ‘The Big Ship’. You can feel your heart bursting.

But there’s never anything saccharine in this love story, with Dosa and co keeping a firm grasp on the Kraffts’ ambition and intelligence. There will always be some gaps left to fill — moments where both the archives and the filmmakers’ imagination can’t quite put all the pieces of the jigsaw together. Still, the Kraffts warned so many around the world of the dangers of volcanoes, avoiding major natural disasters and teaching us how to better care for the planet so it can, in some way, love us back. At one point Maurice says he hopes that by living far away from humans up in the clouds and mountains that he’ll learn to appreciate us a little better. In Fire Of Love , a beautiful distillation of two peoples’ determined lives and loves, we are taught to understand the relationship between the world and ourselves: how love can sometimes be the most potent thing worth remembering.

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Fire of Love review: Married volcano lovers get too close to the flame

A well-conceived Wes Anderson-ish nature documentary balances playfulness against a dark side.

Senior Editor, Movies

Director Sara Dosa's documentary, loaded with gorgeous streams of lava and plumes of ash, starts off on the cool side, a truck pushing its way through several feet of snow. By the time it treks up the craggy mountain and we finally peek over the rim, your eyeballs aren't ready for the bright orange explosions in store: hypnotic footage of rocks on fire, ripples of molten earth, dark rivers pocked with flare-ups. Sometimes, it looks like red car lights on the highway at night. Elsewhere, you may think of a Hawaiian sunset. Never once does it feel less than absolutely dangerous.

Watching Fire of Love , it's obvious how addicting and scary it would be to commit one's life work to the pursuit of such sights — which is a good thing, because Katia and Maurice Krafft themselves, the married Alsatian French volcanologists at the core of the story, remain stubbornly opaque throughout. They are, of course, adorable in their red knit caps (required of all French explorers?), and, as they prep their cameras and equipment, they display the quiet shorthand and efficiency of longtime partners. The film isn't coy about their 1991 deaths from a sudden unpredictable flow, so the quirky Wes Anderson vibe is undercut, tartly, by a sense of fatalism from the start.

"We erupt often," Maurice tells an interviewer digging for marital gossip. But mainly, the romance of the documentary emerges out of its deep, unfaked appreciation for nature: long, uninterrupted stretches where these self-described "weirdos" go off on their own to explore alien worlds like astronauts in their protective gear.

Dosa's technique follows suit, quieting down from its initial hyperactive preciousness into a cleaner grammar. A bloopy, hard-driving electronica score (Brian Eno, Air, credited composer Nicolas Godin, and others) situates us squarely in a brainiac's beat laboratory, while the narrating voice of artist-filmmaker Miranda July — itself a kind of throaty, breathy terrain — supplies just the right balance of hushed awe and diaristic intimacy.

You will wonder, perhaps during a moment when the Kraffts paddle out onto a lake of acid in a rickety rubber dinghy, why they're doing this. Why did they have to get so close to instantaneous death? That thrill-seeking component isn't fully explored (maybe it can't be), and a late-act pivot to chastened responsibility — after mudslides from a 1985 Colombian eruption claimed 22,000 lives and the Kraffts' warnings went unheeded — feels tacked on. Better to commit to the couple's implicit philosophy, a life perched precariously between safety and self-immolation. Already an extremely French cocktail, Fire of Love gets a final dash of existentialism that makes it linger on the tongue: if Godard had a thing for science. Grade: A-

Follow EW's ongoing coverage out of Sundance here.

Related content:

• Sundance Must List 2022: The 23 movies to see at this year's festival
• See the full Sundance 2022 festival lineup
• Sundance cancels in-person 2022 festival due to rising COVID cases, pivots to online event
• 2022 awards season calendar: Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globes, and more

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Fire of Love

This elemental, awe-inspiring doc follows two volcanologists to the ends of the earth

Time Out says

There are only so many times you can shout ‘woah!’ at yourself during one film, but this documentary about two French daredevil volcano chasers pushes that number up. Maurice and Katia Krafft spent the 1970s and 1980s married both to each other and to the pursuit of being right there in the heat of the action whenever a volcano turned lethal. Maurice was a geologist, Katia was a chemist, but they were both volcanologists, dedicated to understanding these explosive natural phenomena, which they decided could only really be classified two ways: they were either ‘red’ (obvious lava flows, less dangerous) or ‘grey’ (more like bombs, less fiery, but more murderous). It was a grey one, Mount Unzen in Japan, which killed them both in 1991. But only after the Kraffts had chased volcanoes all over the world, from Zaire to Washington state in the US, via the Philippines and Italy.

A dreamy voiceover from Miranda July guides us through the Kraffts’ story, as directed by Sara Dosa, who creates a powerful tribute to obsession and to how tiny and powerless we are in the face of geological time and power. The star is the footage: the Kraffts were photographers and filmmakers as well as scientists. They popularised (and funded) their missions through the otherworldly imagery they brought down from the mountains. That means that we’re privy to staggering scenes of the pair in silhouette next to explosive lava – scenes which we could easily think were computer generated if we didn’t know better.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was  computer generated

Daring doesn’t feel like a fitting label when we watch Maurice take a rubber dinghy out onto a lake of hydrochloric acid. Surely there were – are – commentators who could tell us that the Kraffts were reckless, doomed, flawed or some other label that would bring them back down to earth. But that’s not the point of   Fire of Love . This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion. Maurice never did realise his dream of taking a canoe down a lava flow, but Dosa’s film is something like the cinematic equivalent.

Fire of Love premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Fire of Love documentary is a love story between scientists and the volcanoes that killed them

Topic: Arts, Culture and Entertainment

Fire of Love was made out of approximately 200 hours of archival material from the Kraffts, plus 50 hours of footage from their appearances on TV. ( Supplied: Madman )

Sorry to invoke Morrissey, but in the pantheon of lovesick declarations, his ballad of mutually assured destruction might be up there with the greats. "To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die": a line immediately inducted into the softboy hall of fame, and also taken a little too literally, perhaps, by Katia and Maurice Krafft – the French volcanologist couple who lived, worked and, yes, perished side by side in a spectacular eruption in 1991.

The doomed husband-and-wife duo are the subjects of Fire of Love, a documentary that won an editing prize at this year's Sundance. It's not difficult to see why: in the hands of director Sara Dosa, it flits seamlessly between archival footage of the Kraffts's many expeditions, fairytale illustrations, and stylised re-enactments of memories preserved in the pair's sprawling diaries.

It is functionally a biography of two scientists – but also a grand treatise on the seismic thrill of romance, enough to thaw out even the most hardened cynics.

The Kraffts, over their three-decade career, cut a striking image as they clamber up craggy cliff faces and across perilous passages between lakes of lava threatening to swallow them whole. In beet-red beanies and turquoise wind-breakers (it may as well be called The Life Volcanic ), they possess a crazed – and often wryly hilarious – disregard for their own survival.

Dosa told the New York Times: “We wanted to kind of explore how they were crafting their own image as well.” ( Supplied: Madman )

More than once, blistering, molten ammunition arcs through the air around them as they potter nonchalantly beneath, as if taking a sunny stroll through a park.

Most times, barely a layer of fabric separates them from a smouldering demise. When they do – briefly – trial protective gear, it's a flimsy sheet of metal engulfing their entire heads, resembling, more than anything, a costume-store Ned Kelly.

All this in pursuit of their other love: the volcano.

We know, from the outset, how their story will end: engulfed by a pyroclastic flow when Japan's Mt Unzen suddenly erupts on a research trip. There is video of Katia's last moments, sprinting away from a rapidly mushrooming gas cloud – haunting in the way all disaster footage can be, as an uncomfortable glimpse into mortality.

Yet this outcome, rather than casting a melancholy shadow over the rest of the film, imbues it with a sense of peace.

Indeed, Fire of Love sometimes plays like a long, loving elegy.

As the Kraffts’s 16mm footage did not include sound, Fire of Love uses Foley effects and field recordings accumulated over 30 years. ( Supplied: Madman )

The Kraffts's lifelong fixation, we are told, begins in adolescence, both of them independently awe-struck by the majestic unpredictability of volcanoes. They meet by chance in 1966 – a meet-cute to rival any rom-com, depicted in a recreation that recalls the twee sensibilities of Wes Anderson or (500) Days of Summer.

There is no definitive record of the encounter, but varying versions show cups of coffee left unfinished, park benches flanked by swaying trees, and split screens of Katia and Maurice appearing to gaze into each other's eyes. With a wink, it skirts the line between charming and cloying.

So does the narration, courtesy of filmmaker and writer Miranda July ( Kajillionaire ; Me and You and Everyone We Know). With her classic honeyed lilt, July unwinds the Kraffts's tale like a bedtime story.

The couple's romantic relationship soon blooms into a working one. Before long, they are venturing to far-flung volcanoes in Iceland and the Democratic Republic of Congo to study their rhythms, reporting their findings to an immediately idolising public via news and talk show appearances.

“They were so driven toward the unknown, all the while knowing that they could never fully understand … the mystery of volcanoes,” Dosa (pictured) told Vox. ( Supplied: Madman )

Katia is the geochemist; Maurice the geologist. The difference is hardly a few syllables, though Fire of Love paints them as yin and yang.

She is a bird, Dosa suggests – careful, precise, and detailed. Meanwhile, he is an elephant seal, with a voracious appetite for documentation.

It's Maurice's cinematography, shot on vibrant 16mm, that comprises much of the film – years of labour culled to a tight 90 minutes.

By the end of their lives, the Kraffts had collected some of volcanology's most groundbreaking observations, and contributed to warning systems that would save thousands from deadly eruptions – though you wouldn't be able to tell based on Maurice's footage alone.

The sheer goofiness of that footage works to offset what could easily become self-indulgent. Unlike other portraits of extreme thrillseekers – Oscar winner Free Solo (2018), say – Fire of Love never mines for cheap spectacle.

Instead, there's a lived-in ease to the whole affair. The camera follows Katia making googly eyes as intensely as it watches a volcanic explosion.

In an astounding interlude, it descends into zany comedy as the Kraffts and their compadres ride off into the mountains on horseback, the stars of their own kitschy western.

Sometimes, Fire of Love can skew slightly too saccharine. "Across humanity's two million years, two tiny humans are born in the same place, at the same time, and they love the same thing," July intones, giving misplaced weight to cosmic fate in a documentary that has otherwise focused on a more earthly kind of grandeur.

Dosa learned about the Kraffts while she was looking for images of erupting volcanoes in Iceland in the 70s for her documentary The Seer and the Unseen. ( Supplied: Madman )

When it works, though, the narration can evoke the same wide-eyed giddiness present in much of July's own oeuvre, which brims with unorthodox heroines breaking away from restrictive arrangements to discover the world in weird and fantastical fashion.

It's easy to imagine Katia and Maurice slotting into one of July's films, as idiosyncratic and headstrong as they are. They, too, are fleeing from reality, their quest spurred by a "disappointment with humanity", as Maurice admits.

But up on a trembling mountain, that disappointment gives way to an all-consuming love – for each other as much as for the mesmeric volatility of nature.

"What is it," July questions at one point over a Brian Eno cut , "that makes the Earth's heart beat? Its blood flow?" Suddenly, a whisper of synths snowballs into a glimmering outburst; we cut to a pair of silhouettes dancing beneath a firestorm.

As cheesy as it sounds, we, too, might begin to understand the Kraffts's obsession, taking solace in our own relative insignificance – our lives merely a speck of ash on a gargantuan, indifferent rock.

Fire of Love is in cinemas now.

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Fire of Love

Intrepid scientists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft died in a volcanic explosion doing the very thing that brought them together: unraveling the mysteries of volcanoes by capturing the m... Read all Intrepid scientists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft died in a volcanic explosion doing the very thing that brought them together: unraveling the mysteries of volcanoes by capturing the most explosive imagery ever recorded. Intrepid scientists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft died in a volcanic explosion doing the very thing that brought them together: unraveling the mysteries of volcanoes by capturing the most explosive imagery ever recorded.

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• 68 User reviews
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• 34 wins & 66 nominations total

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• Trivia Documentary is presented almost entirely through archival material. No contemporary interviews relating to the subject are used.

Maurice Krafft : If I could eat rocks, I'd stay in the volcanoes and never come down.

• Crazy credits "Dedicated to the 43 people who lost their lives on Mt. Unzen, June 3 1991"
• Connections Featured in The Oscars (2023)
• Soundtracks Je me Sens Vivre (Un Uomo Vivo) Music by Gino Paoli Italian lyrics by Gino Paoli French lyrics by Jacques Plante Performed by Dalida Published by Edir Edizioni Internaz Riunite Srl, Universal Music Publishing Ricordi Srl Courteys of Barclay

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• Jul 10, 2022

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• Runtime 1 hour 38 minutes
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Fire of love.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 4 Reviews
• Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Breathtaking volcano docu deals in danger and death.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Fire of Love is a National Geographic documentary about French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. They were romantic partners and worked together from the time they met in the 1960s until their death in 1991 during the eruption of Japan's Mount Unzen. Their work has gone a long…

Why Age 10+?

Death is discussed. People seen on camera are said to die in a cataclysmic volca

A married couple is depicted. They sometimes tease each other, but nothing "goop

Infrequent use of "stupid" and "weirdo."

Archival cigarette smoking.

Any Positive Content?

Scientific knowledge can help save lives. Perseverance is important for making f

Even though the Kraffts' proximity to danger eventually cost them their lives, t

Katia and Maurice are both experts in their field, and neither is more or less p

Violence & Scariness

Death is discussed. People seen on camera are said to die in a cataclysmic volcano eruption. Gory leg wound from steam burn. Some images of destruction: dead bodies covered in ash, dead animals, a human arm in rubble. Dangerous situations. Images of bombing and explosions in Vietnam.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple is depicted. They sometimes tease each other, but nothing "goopy" is shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Scientific knowledge can help save lives. Perseverance is important for making forward progress.

Positive Role Models

Even though the Kraffts' proximity to danger eventually cost them their lives, their studies -- according to the movie -- eventually resulted in helping to save others. They venture selflessly into danger, but also a little selfishly, with little regard for anyone else's feelings.

Diverse Representations

Katia and Maurice are both experts in their field, and neither is more or less powerful than the other. A female voice narrates their story. No characters of color are present.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Fire of Love is a National Geographic documentary about French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. They were romantic partners and worked together from the time they met in the 1960s until their death in 1991 during the eruption of Japan's Mount Unzen. Their work has gone a long way toward keeping other people safe, but there's an element of danger here, too. Nevertheless it's a breathtaking movie, filled with amazing volcano footage. Death is discussed, and central figures in the movie meet their end. There are unsettling images of destruction, as well as news footage of bombings in Vietnam, dead animals, dead bodies, a human arm in rubble, and a gory burn wound on a leg. There are brief uses of "stupid" and "weirdo," and archival smoking is seen. While the main couple is married, "goopy" romantic stuff -- outside of some teasing -- is nowhere to be seen. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (4)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Suspenseful story of scientists who loved volcanos

Beautiful footage of volcanos that come at a great cost, what's the story.

In FIRE OF LOVE, documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa tells the story of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, a married couple who traveled the world, wrote books, took photos, and made films about volcanos. Their ultimate goal was to save lives, discovering warning signs that would allow people to evacuate and avoid the deadly fallout of an eruption. After some 25 years by each other's side, the Kraffts finally met their end when Japan's Mount Unzen erupted in June of 1991. But their incredible footage still survives -- and inspires.

Is It Any Good?

Filled with breathtaking footage and making use of skillful editing, tranquil, thoughtful music, and gorgeously poetic narration, this documentary merges science, nature, and romance. The decision to use actor-artist-filmmaker Miranda July to narrate Fire of Love was inspired; her delicate, melancholy, almost whispered line readings lend a sense of the ethereal to the movie, casting the images in an existential light. Again and again, as the movie describes Maurice and Katia's singular focus on their studies, July's voicework and the expert filmmaking help us understand the draw. (The Kraffts were also discussed in Werner Herzog's volcano documentary Into the Inferno .)

The footage, much of it shot by the Kraffts themselves, is glorious, and it's easy to agree with Maurice when he asserts that volcanos are the most beautiful things on earth. And, as July says in her narration, the camera loves these two. Maurice is like a roly-poly Teddy Bear, and Katia gazes at life through her huge spectacles. If Fire of Love has a flaw, it's that there's too much fire and too little love. Director Dosa is limited to archival footage -- the movie makes no secret of the fact that Katia and Maurice are gone -- and much of it features one Krafft or the other, but rarely both. There are only fleeting glimpses of what their personal and romantic relationship must have been like. Even so, the film is moving on a human level, and awesome on a cosmic level.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Fire of Love 's depiction of violence and destruction. How intense was it? How much was it necessary for the movie to show to illustrate its point?

Why do you think the Kraffts put themselves in dangerous spots if their goal was to save lives?

How can volcanos be both beautiful and deadly? What other things in nature share those distinctions?

What did you learn about volcanos from the movie? Did it inspire you to do more research?

Do you consider the Kraffts role models ? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 6, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : November 11, 2022
• Cast : Katia Krafft , Maurice Krafft , Miranda July
• Director : Sara Dosa
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Female actors
• Studio : National Geographic
• Genre : Documentary
• Topics : Science and Nature
• Character Strengths : Perseverance
• Run time : 93 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : thematic material including some unsettling images, and brief smoking
• Last updated : June 26, 2024

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Fire of Love (Canada/United States, 2022)

Herzog documentaries are almost always a treat and, although The Fire Within doesn’t quite reach the level of Grizzly Man , it’s close. Fire of Love , however, feels like a fairly traditional non-fiction chronology, complete with unnecessarily cute animated sequences and an obnoxious narration delivered by Miranda July. July’s unhelpful commentary, which runs the gamut from extraneous to redundant, tempted me to turn off the volume. The movie also tries to posit the Kraffts’ tale as a “love story” and, although the two were likely as passionate about one another as they were about volcanos, that aspect of their relationship doesn’t really come across. The footage isn’t there because it doesn’t exist (something acknowledged by the narration). As a result, the movie feels strangely unfocused. I recall reading a contemporaneous review which argued Fire of Love “lacks insight,” and I think that comment nails the central problem with the production. It never delves beneath the surface. It’s straightforward and strangely unsatisfying as a result. The images captured by the Kraffts are on a significantly higher level than the rest of the material.

Comments Add Comment

• O.J.: Made in America (2016)
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• (There are no more better movies of Katia Krafft)
• (There are no more worst movies of Katia Krafft)
• (There are no more better movies of Maurice Krafft)
• (There are no more worst movies of Maurice Krafft)