The joy of volcano-chasing

Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’. They married in 1970, formed a crack team of volcano-chasers, équipe volcanique, and set off to get as close as they possibly could to the very edge of every fiery crater, to collect samples and data and just to be there, ecstatic with the enormity of it all, like a pair of mad moths drawn into a candle flame.

‘Maurice and Katia were always the first ones there when a volcano erupted,’ says Sara Dosa, the writer and director of Fire of Love, when we meet in Trafalgar Square. ‘They very strategically developed a network of people around the world who would call them as soon as the seismograph started to move. The more we learnt about them as characters, the more I think we fell in love with them, didn’t we?’ Dosa looks at her co-producer and co-writer, Shane Boris. ‘They were just so wise and hilarious and philosophical and idiosyncratic.’

Fire of Love isn’t the first film to feature the extraordinary Kraffts. Some of the silent footage they shot, of dancing walls of fire, and of Katia calmly walking beside boiling rivers of lava has appeared before – most notably in Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary Into the Inferno. In the Herzog doc the Kraffts are a sideshow, playing second fiddle to the grave, awesome forces of nature and the grave, awesome forces of Herzog himself.