Director Sara Dosa and producer Shane Boris discuss the formal and tonal choices they made to capture the adventurous spirits of Katia and Maurice Krafft in “Fire of Love.”
It feels like a very French New Wave thing to be in love with a mystery. But Katia and Maurice Krafft, the subjects of Sara Dosa’s documentary “Fire of Love” were, to be fair, very French. They were also celebrated volcanologists who left behind an incredible wealth of archive material, books, and films about perhaps the most awe-inspiring natural feature of our world. In “Fire of Love,” Dosa uses all the editing, sonic, and visual tools at her disposal to shape a film around the Kraffts’ passion for volcanos, and for each other. It is that emphasis on the couple’s ardor, imbued into the film’s presentation and tone, that gives us the truest sense of who they were.
“There’s a sentence in a book that Maurice wrote where he says, ‘For me, Katia and volcanoes, it is a love story.’ And we felt like he was really handing us a thesis for how he understood his life and how we too decided to kind of tell this story,” Dosa told IndieWire.
“The other thing too that is contained in that sentence [is that] it’s not just a love story, it’s a love triangle between Katia and Maurice and volcanoes. And that made us think of the French New Wave films that were becoming very popular as Katia and Maurice themselves were coming of age, and French New Wave aesthetics really show up in their own work. So that also really helped to inform our direction. We embraced some of the hallmarks of that movement in how we edited the film associatively, in the music choices, and in kind of the sense of play as well.”
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