Fire Of Love director Sara Dosa talks to Screen about delving into archive, finding an unusual love story and why volcanoes are ‘the stuff of magic’.
Sara Dosa’s archive documentary Fire Of Love depicts one of the year’s more unusual love triangles — between French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their shared passion, volcanoes.
“Very early on, we decided we wanted Fire Of Love to not just be a love story, but to be a love-triangle structure,” says Dosa. “That was because of a sentence in a book that Maurice wrote — ‘For me, Katia and volcanoes, it is a love story.’ That’s at the end of our film now, but for us it was a genesis point where Maurice is giving us a thesis statement on his life. Love for Katia and volcanoes is at the heart of Maurice’s life, and love for Maurice and volcanoes is at the heart of Katia’s life.”
The Kraffts were a married couple of expert volcanologists, who travelled the planet for two decades chasing eruptions and documenting their discoveries. They died in a 1991 volcanic explosion in Japan.
Dosa first discovered the Kraffts back in 2017 when she was directing feature documentary The Seer And The Unseen, about an Icelandic woman who claims she can communicate with spirits. Dosa wanted some archival images of erupting volcanoes — “We wanted to show just how alive Iceland’s landscapes were… volcanoes are just extraordinarily surreal and immediately lend themselves to the stuff of magic.”
Soon, she was interested in more than just volcanoes. “Once we started learning more about Katia and Maurice, I became enthralled with their story. We started to learn more about their personalities and saw how playful and also how philosophical they were.” The Kraffts had also shot hundreds of hours of video footage. “We knew this could make a spectacular film,” says Dosa.
Covid diversion
When the pandemic struck in early 2020, San Francisco-based Dosa had to put a different project on hold for logistical reasons. But she thought it could be the perfect time to go back to the Kraffts — “We were lucky to get these guides through the unknown, and helping us navigate the terrain of our Covid universe.”
Dosa’s past work — directing The Seer And The Unseen and 2014’s The Last Season, and producing or co-producing Audrie & Daisy, The Edge Of Democracy and An Inconvenient Sequel — has been more vérité style, not focused on archive.
Making her first archive-driven project “was extremely exciting and extremely daunting all at once. But we knew we wanted it to be archival to use Katia and Maurice’s own imagery to tell their own story,” she explains. “We tried to adopt the methodologies of vérité filmmaking to an archival piece, which seems a bit counterintuitive but ended up being helpful. For me, the heart of vérité filmmaking is about deep listening and about relationship building with your subjects. So we had to figure out what that meant for an archival film, especially for subjects that have passed away 30 years ago.”
The research meant delving into the Kraffts’ own footage but also talking to former collaborators and reading the many books written by the couple. “We tried to find ways to still listen to them aside from the literal listening to them in their footage.”
Luckily, most of the Kraffts’ footage had been well preserved at Image’Est, an archival house in Nancy, France — and it helps that one of the film’s producers, Ina Fichman of Intuitive Pictures, speaks French. Maurice’s brother Bertrand also gave the family’s blessing to the project, approving Image’Est to license materials to the team — and at an affordable rate for an indie film.
The project’s archival researcher Nancy Marcotte also tracked down further material, when the Kraffts were part of other people’s footage, on news programmes in France or on a variety TV show in Belgium. The team also shot bits of new footage — by cinematographer Pablo Alvarez-Mesa — such as B-roll at the Kraffts’ home.
New York-based Sandbox Films came on as executive producer and primary financier. Other key partners include National Geographic Documentary Films, which acquired the title at its Sundance 2022 launch, and began releasing in cinemas last July via codistribution partners including Neon for North America.
Narrative structure
Telling a highly structured story using a preponderance of volcano and lava-flow footage led to another key creative choice. “This was a very constructed film,” explains Doha. “It had to be built from many pieces, and that’s when we thought of it as a collage film, trying to find the resonant juxtapositions, and that’s why we needed narration. It gave us a framework for a narrative structure.”
Early in the process, Shane Boris, a writer and producer on the film, attended a writers’ retreat with Dosa. “We wrote an outline that followed this idea of these two human lovers that meet through their shared volcano love, their relationship is tested and pulled apart and yet they have to reconcile — and that all was very true to their lived experience and also the chronology of their life,” says Dosa.
They turned to actress and filmmaker Miranda July for the voiceover. “We needed a different narrative vehicle to tell the story,” says Dosa of the narration, which covers themes such as time, space, meaning and relationships. “We also wanted some sort of vehicle to explain that we did not possess all the answers because there were gaps in the archive. There are things, as we say in the narration, that have been lost to time.”
The narration could also draw on the “French New Wave aesthetics” that Dosa loved and that reflected the Kraffts’ own filmmaking. “Their writing was rich and playful, and it reminded me of Truffaut’s narration,” she adds.
Editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput — who also co-wrote the film with Dosa and Boris — were key collaborators. “Jocelyne started with the development reel and we discovered the initial aesthetic grammar,” says Dosa, who notes the production always planned to have two editors given the tight timeline. “[Once] Jocelyne had helped establish the tone and voice for the film, it was a very natural pairing of the two. At first we divided up the scenes but eventually there was a beautiful and fluid cross-pollination.”
Fire Of Love has made the Oscar feature documentary shortlist of 15 titles and the Bafta longlist of 10, and also secured Dosa a place on Bafta’s best director longlist. But she is still deciding on her next project. “I have some ideas, and I’m excited about similar themes and stories, looking at the human relationship with non-human nature.”
Fire Of Love has changed her as a filmmaker, she says. “Working in archive and specifically in this kind of collage way and incorporating narration, I feel like it unlocked some possibilities for me. Like a lot of people during the pandemic when so many things broke, we were finding new ways to work or to continue to connect to the things we found meaningful.
“This forced me to work and think in a completely different way, and I’m grateful for that.”
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