Katia and Maurice Krafft, a love devoured by passion to the volcano

• Cinema 'RRR', the Indian delirium that sweeps Netflix and that could surprise the Oscars

• Spanish cinema 'Alcarràs', 'Cinco Lobitos' and 'As Bestas' will compete to represent Spain at the Oscars

• Interview Sylvester Stallone: ​​"I prefer to act now than when I was 35 years old"

'

(literally "fire of love") is a romantic story that explodes.

In the most obvious and rigorous of the senses.

Awarded at the Sundance festival as the best documentary, successive premieres around the world have done nothing more than confirm the evidence:

"I like to think of the film as if it were a new version of Truffaut's

. There is also a love triangle here: there is him, Maurice; there is she, Katia, and in between, their shared passion for volcanoes that, without a doubt, are one more character", comments the director

so convinced of what she says that she is willing to take the parallelism with the

two steps further, towards Jean-Luc Godard.

in mind

...there's sex, explosions, passion, and most of all, a sense of freedom on the very edge of tremendously exciting danger," she says.

And we believe it.

To situate ourselves, all the footage of

comes from the films that Katia shot mostly throughout her life.

The source material possesses the naïve brilliance mixed with enlightened pedagogy of the best

.

Pure shared passion.

The scientists, who met as youngsters while burning the eyelashes on the edge of the lava, roll the volcanoes and roll themselves.

But without exhibitionism.

It is not about stealing the plane from the incandescent mountains but, quite the contrary, the idea is to make them the true and only heroines of an endless, immense and, in their own way, happy tragedy.

"She didn't limit herself to documenting what they saw, she took the risk of filming as she was doing back then in the 1960s.

that transcends their utilitarian purpose.

They are sequences in which passion crosses the screen." And, indeed, it is.

Katia and Maurice Krafft in a moment from 'Fire of love'. CARAMEL

Maurice is extroverted, risky, slightly boastful and with a comical vis that many licensed comedians would like for themselves.

Katia prefers to stay behind her, more cautious, cerebral and with a restrained, ironic and deep sense of humor.

She would say that she detonates inside.

In her own way, everything

that's the surname, it seems worthy of a volcanic metaphor: either because of the spectacular explosions of one, or because of the silent threat of the other.

The film traces his life from the first trip almost to adventure, to whatever came out, spurred on by the irrepressible desire to be close to what burns;

until the very end when the couple was already a regular presence on French television and their teachings had become a love song to the Earth, its power and, above all, to life in any of its forms, including the inorganic ones.

"What they were able to understand and transmit to whoever wanted to listen was the immense power of nature. Above all, there is in the Kraffts a will to understand that translates into respect. For them, the force of the Earth, without reaching mysticism, it was something real and completely experiential and palpable, even if it was with a fireproof suit. Let's say that the reading they made of their work and their relationship with the environment is exactly the opposite of what we see now.

his ideology, the Earth was not a simple resource from which to extract raw materials and trade with them, and his view of the spectacle of volcanoes is not that of a tourist in search of new experiences to entertain himself.

They wanted to understand, in some way, to understand their place and our place in the world", comments the director in a single breath.

In her previous work,

(the seer and the invisible), Dosa rehearsed a kind of narration between reality and hallucination by the hand of a woman lost in Iceland and convinced that she could talk to nature and its many creatures and circumstances.

Very aware of the dangers and, above all, of the threat of the rubble.

If you will, a fairly visible thread links one film to another, as they are so radically different.

Of course, without giving up magic, the magical certainty of a volcano bent on destroying everything and starting over.

And again.

"The danger conveyed by the images of Katie and Maurice is not there to be scary but, on the contrary, to move," says the director.

Katia and Maurice Krafft in a moment from 'Fire of love'. CARAMEL

The Kraffts say that, despite all the typologies, there are only two types of volcanoes: those tinted bright red, those that flow, like rivers of blood, predictable, and the others, gray, dark, explosive, unpredictable that in one fell swoop they wipe out entire mountains, those that bury everything.

And to the latter, as dangerous, Katia and Maurice dedicated their last efforts.

In June of that same year, while filming the eruptions of Mount Unzen in Japan, they were devoured in an instant along with 40 journalists.

The images remain.

And his last words: "I'm never afraid, because I've seen so many eruptions in 23 years that even if I died tomorrow, I wouldn't care."

Good movies, like love stories, are booming.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Japan

• cinema