“Fire of Love” tells the story of a scientist’s passion for volcanoes

How do you tell a story when the final chapter is public knowledge? You start at the end.

“Fire of Love”, the touching documentary by Sara Dosa about the couple of volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, begins on June 2, 1991, on Mount Unzen, in the Japan . The Kraffts, famous scientists in their field, are seen in a lively mood in archival footage. But narrator Miranda July quickly puts a stop to it.

“Tomorrow will be their last day”, we are told through his voice. The Unzen would erupt on June 3, killing the Kraffts along with 41 others in a pyroclastic flow. It’s such a definitive ending that there was no choice but to start there.

“We really didn’t want the audience to focus on how Katia and Maurice were going to die… instead, we expected people to focus on how they lived,” the director said in an interview with the show’s “Amanpour” show. CNN .

“This is a collage film that is told through their footage, their photographs, their writing, and we wanted the audience to know first and foremost that what they are watching is what the Kraffts left behind when they died. So we had to acknowledge his death.”

The film includes excerpts from around 200 hours of footage taken by the couple for their own research and documentaries, as well as media interviews and excerpts from their books.

“Fire of Love” drew near-universal praise from critics, first at the Sundance Festival in January and leading up to the film’s release in the US and UK this summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Armed with a 16mm video camera, French scientists captured the intimate life of volcanoes from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Colombia and the United States.

In vivid hues, bubbles and rushes of lava and flying rocks, these churning mounds appear filled with sound and fury, struggling with their creative and destructive potential.

Working with editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, Dosa leverages the anthropomorphic qualities of the volcano footage to illustrate the Kraffts’ relationship to each other and their subjects. “We like to think of the movie as a love triangle between Maurice, Katia and volcanoes,” she explained.

Katia and Maurice met in the 1960s because they had a common interest. Their personalities contrasted, Maurice gregarious and carefree, Katia more quiet and observant, differences that carried over to his fieldwork.

In one scene, we see Katia embarrassed as her husband paddles through a lake of sulfuric acid, and then faces more than three hours of paddling against a headwind to get back to shore.

“This is going to kill me one day,” says Maurice of his work. Katia often tried to make sure that didn’t happen – even if she wasn’t risk averse herself.

In one of the many astonishing scenes in the documentary, she stands, calm and serene, on the edge of a crater while measuring a temperature of 1,200ºC.

Asked to describe their relationship by an interviewer, Maurice jokes: “It’s volcanic – we erupt often!”

“They had a conflict there,” Dosa said. “They were usually able to reconcile, because they knew it was very important to be in sync with each other, to support each other, if they were to seek their ultimate love, which was close to erupting volcanoes.”

The Kraffts knew how to leverage their daring pursuits to gain fame and funding to continue their research. His image-making was not an altruistic exercise. But it benefited Dosa that the Kraffts were, in his words, so “fascinated, like a magnet, closer and closer” to danger.

“It’s really thanks to their love and daring, of getting so close to capture these images, that we now have them in our film,” said Dosa. And while “they actually died doing what they loved,” their legacy prevented many more deaths.

Krafft’s footage of a pyroclastic flow in 1986, for example, was used in an educational video to help governments understand its dangers, the director explained, and a week after the couple’s deaths their lessons were put into practice when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. “The video helped save many lives,” said Dosa. “It’s quite tragic, but poetic.”

“Fire of Love” is in theaters United States and will be released on UK on the 29th of July. There is no release date in Brazil.

Explorers pushed to the limit

British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ bestselling account of Michael Stroud’s 2,172-kilometer journey across Antarctica is a classic for a reason. Relentless, often harrowing, Fiennes details the gangrene, hunger, and hypothermia they faced, as well as the extreme mental cost of the undertaking.

Winston Churchill’s old epigram, “if you’re going through hell, keep going”, comes to mind.

Not all trips are counted in kilometers, as Matt Wolf proves in his documentary about eight men and women quarantined inside the Biosphere 2 research facility between 1991 and 1993.

The Arizona site was designed to test whether humans could live in deep space within an ecological system, growing and creating all of their own food in a pressure cooker environment. The results were equally fascinating and disturbing.

In 1970, Japanese adventurer and “the godfather of extreme skiing” Yuichiro Miura attempted to descend Mount Everest. He wasn’t alone – Miura’s team consisted of hundreds of porters and tons of equipment.

Bruce Nyznik’s Oscar-winning documentary meditates deeply on the mountain journey and the lives lost in the pursuit of one man’s greatness.

Pieces of Werner Herzog’s documentary will look familiar to anyone who has seen Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love”, as both contain footage taken by the Kraffts.

But the German film director’s documentary takes a broader focus, exploring active volcanoes from Ethiopia to North Korea with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer. They are a worthy subject for Herzog’s type of poetic narrative.

Journalist David Grann set out on his own expedition as he tried to discover the fate of lost explorer Percy Fawcett. The famous Brit disappeared into the Amazon in 1925, fate unknown, and Grann, intrepid, though not always prepared, enters the rainforest in search of answers in this New York Times bestseller.

His investigation weaves together Fawcett’s backstory, as well as the explorers who went in search of him. It was adapted into a beautiful 2016 movie by James Gray.