“Fire of Love,” a new feature-length documentary from “The Last Season’s” Sara Dosa, will examine the love story between two intrepid scientists who died in a volcanic explosion.
The film will be co-produced by Sandbox Films, the company behind Werner Herzog’s “Fireball” and the recent Sundance winner “All Light, Everywhere,” as well as producer Ina Fichman’s Intuitive Pictures (“The Oslo Diaries”) and producer Shane Boris’s Cottage M (“Stray”). Dosa will direct and produce the film which centers on volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who sought to understand the magic of volcanoes by capturing the most explosive imagery ever recorded.
“Fire of Love” will use the Kraffts’ rarely seen archive of images, as well as their writings and collected illustrations, to chart their adventures, scientific discoveries and deep emotional bond. The creative team has been given unprecedented access to the more than 200 hours of footage that the couple shot over the course of 20 years, which has been preserved at the Image’Est cultural association in Nancy, France. The filmmakers say that the story will be told in the French New Wave style.
“When I learned about Katia and Maurice’s passion for volcanoes, I was deeply inspired by the lengths that they went to ‘chase volcanoes’ and I became fixated on a set of questions: What does it mean to love the Earth so much that you would die for it? What does it mean to romance a volcano?,” said Dosa. “The tropes of French New Wave films, which formed the cultural landscape as Katia and Maurice came of age, seemed period-specific, poetic and playful way through which to explore this story of the Earth.”
The film is executive produced by Greg Boustead and Jessica Harrop for Sandbox Films. Submarine Entertainment is representing worldwide rights.
“At its core, this project asks an essential question: Is any sacrifice too great, too personal, in the pursuit of passion and pushing human knowledge forward?,” said Jessica Harrop, head of production and development, Sandbox Films. “The Kraffts’ unreleased archive contains imagery of some of the most death-defying fieldwork ever attempted, and an intimate portrait of the quirky and lovable volcanologists who were recording it. We are thrilled to be developing this story with an incredible creative team and can’t wait to share it with the world.”
