Fire of Love is a bittersweet documentary about two people who found something they were both passionate about that it only made sense for them to fall in love and they would be together for the rest of their lives. Maurice and Katia Krafft were two 20-something French students who met studying at the University of Strasbourg who shared a common fascination with volcanoes. Ergo, their life and marriage revolved around volcanoes.
When they married in 1970, they decided to take their honeymoon at Mount Stromboli off the coast of Sicily so they could study and photograph its eruption. They decided not to have kids as being volcanologists, it would take up a lot of their time. And it’s hard to raise a family when you’re moving around the world, camping out on islands with no people or civilization to research volcanoes.
And the footage they got is amazing. The documentary, directed by Sara Dosa, who also wrote and produced it, assembles footage that almost doesn’t look real. Lava flows with a ASMR calming feel to it. There are other scenes where they appear too close to erupting lava and molten rock with only a heat suit on to protect them. The documentary is distributed through National Geographic and currently streaming on Disney-Plus. It’s been nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar.
If the footage shown looks older, there’s a reason, Maurice and Katia were killed on June 3, 1991, along with 41 other people when Mt. Unzen in Japan erupted. Knowing this going in is what makes the images of them walking among fire and lava believable. Both of them knew there was the possibility they would die. “I want to get closer, to the belly of the volcano,” Maurice says. “It will kill me one day, but that doesn’t bother me at all.”
Katia felt the same stating at one time, “It’s not that I flirt with death. But at that moment, I don’t care at all.” Needless to say, the last known photo of them before Mt. Unzen erupted, they were standing close together. Yet, as narrator Miranda July says, there were times when Maurice did too much that it made Katia worry. And why wouldn’t it? We all know we’re going to die one day but we want to extend our lives as much as we can. Yet some of us just have to take risks.
But this isn’t a documentary about death. It’s about life. People may think of volcanoes and eruptions as destruction. But after the lava and magma cools, it forms a new land mass that is home to vegetation. The Kraffts were trying to help people. The documentary follows the eruptuon of Mount St. Helens, which they came to study.
And then there’s images of the Armero tragedy on Nov. 13, 1985 in Tolimo, Colombia. These might be the hardest images of the documentary to watch as the eruption and the aftermath led to the deaths of about 23,000 people and injuring 5,000 more. Maurice says that the Colombian government was responsible for many of those deaths because they didn’t believe the volcanologists.
Less than two weeks after their 1991 deaths, Mount Pinutabo in the Phillipines erupted after being dormant for centuries. The government evacuated about 58,000 people with many pointing to the films and research made by the Kraffts. And probably without this documentary, most people wouldn’t know of their contributions. The Kraffts didn’t have kids of their owns but they were able to save lives even after death.
And as it goes, life goes on.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 