A Love Note to Fire of Love

Fire of Love is not just a documentary. It's a love story.

Love Notes is a feature where a writer talks about why they love a movie, how it makes them feel or how it changed their life.

Fire of Love is less a love story between Katia and Maurice Krafft—which is, yes, very much the primary theme of Sara Dosa's 2022 documentary that chronicles their lives as intrepid adventurers and daredevil volcanologists—and no, the love story isn't with the volcanoes they research, though they definitely do love them. Their obsession consumes their entire lives—both figuratively and literally—as (spoiler) their lives reach their end at the site of a volcanic eruption.

There's a moment in the film, mostly composed of illustrations and the Kraffts' own archival footage, that shows Katia and Maurice's perfectly chosen red beanies adorning their sunburnt faces as they trek up the side of an active volcano, and I realized—this is a love story to us. They aren't just volcanologists; they're artists, perfectly aware of their image in spite of their insane human feats in the pursuit of scientific research. To be a scientist and an artist doesn't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive—if anything, I think their mission was intricately aligned with what they wanted to express: a sheer love for this planet that most of us struggle to understand, and many have a hard time simply appreciating.

They dedicated their lives to getting as close as humanly possible to an unexplainable force, in an effort to capture its beauty and terror—for us, for you and me—so we begin to love this planet again, or for the first time. So we go beyond our comfort zones and explore a little further each day. So we push the boundaries of what we know about our beautiful world so that we can conserve it, learn from it, and care for it in our role as guardians.

With every perfectly composed shot in this documentary, underscored by Miranda July's poetic narration, you feel the care they had for their field and for each other—using photos and film as a way to capture the magnificent things they experienced with the rest of the world. They shared a love of storytelling and a love of our shared humanity in the face of something beyond comprehension.

“Look at how small we humans are against this volcanic force. The only thing that will remain of our passage is that we can write, tell stories, and film,” Maurice says toward the end of the film, and he's right. This footage is what remains of their life's work and passion.

With every breathtaking, impossible shot—as the vibrant reds and oranges of the magma bleed through the frame, or the gray smoke distorts and envelops the landscape—there is love: in the supernatural scenes they are witnessing, in the sheer effort and bravery it took to document it all, in the companionship Katia and Maurice shared, side by side as they stood at the edge of the abyss. And then there is love for us—the unknown viewers and curious humans they hoped to connect with, to share the thing they loved more than anything else. Like a volcano erupts and changes everything in its wake, there is love in all that they created and all that they left behind.