There are love stories that seem impossible to believe until you watch the living proof of it. It isn’t just photos, but a full archive of homemade videos and news interviews that tell the tale. Now, add the backdrop to this marriage and what brought them together in the first place.
There are plenty of marriages that have a unique story, but this is arguably the most unique of them all. It was a marriage forged in lava and one certainly many had never heard of until director Sara Dosa assembled together everything from the catalog that told a story forged in the curiosity of lava.
The subjects are Katia and Maurice Krafft of France, who met while studying in college and married in 1970. Forgoing a family, they chose to commit their lives to studying volcanoes, especially the active ones, risking their lives to go all over the world documenting their behavior. At first, they are interested in red volcanos, where lava comes out and they simply follow the flow. It is pretty amusing that these two would be fearless and sometimes playful with what they were finding.
By 1980, however, their direction changed with the Mount St. Helens eruption and its destruction caused by not being a lava flow. Instead, the white volcano, made of hot gas and causing major violence, becomes their focus and commitment to ensuring safety.
With Miranda July as narrator, Dosa completes a moving picture book of a couple destined to die under such horrible circumstances, yet it seems romantic how they went out. July’s storytelling hits the right tone in verbalizing the commitment the Kraffts had to each other and the job, that regardless of the obvious ending that is foreshadowed at the start, it was an important place for the couple to be that close to the action. For Katia, is clearly a woman who is not afraid of such a physically demanding job and it is an adventure worth taking part in. Just watching her walk casually along the volcano and being inches from lava is not for everyone.
Volcanologists risk their lives to learn about these temperamental forces which is beautiful and as equally dangerous. It does not deter the Kraffts and Sara Dosa does them the justice with the full, complete story of this extraordinary love story under the erupting volcano.