[imagesource: YouTube / National Geographic]

It turns out that staring into the void can actually be pretty romantic.

Well at least for Katia and Maurice Krafft, two scientists who built their relationship and life on their shared love for hot molten lava.

The volcanologist pair and their volcanoes are the subjects of a new Sundance breakout documentary from National Geographic Documentary Films called Fire of Love.

The doccie has already received Oscar buzz and has been referred to as the “greatest lava story ever told” and “hands down, the documentary of the year” according to Rolling Stone.

Traipsing alongside numerous glowing chasms in the earth’s crust was how Katia and Maurice found love and meaning in their lives, becoming a stranger-than-fiction love story like no other, one that the documentarian Sara Dosa called a tale of a “love triangle”:

And indeed, the volcanoes act as a floating third party in their amour fou, with each new scaled peak and rockpile beguiling them separately and collectively…(The movie even takes that notion one step further, giving “co-starring” credits to Mauna Loa, Nyiragongo, Una Una, Krafla, and Mt. St. Helens.)

Dosa was able to use some of the most captivating footage from the couple’s adventure archives, which shows astonishing solar-orange geysers spewing and flowing with molten streams pulsing, all captured in 16mm footage shot by either the colleagues of the volcanologists or the Kraffts themselves.

What a shot:

Image: NatGeo/Neon

To add that flare of poeticism and whimsy, the filmmakers chose multi-hyphenate Miranda July as the narrator who communicated the intimacy of the film’s characters with such “richness and depth and a loving curiosity”, reported IndieWire.

Early on, the film does make mention of the couple’s untimely death at the hands of one of their lovers’ explosions in 1991, with Dosa turning to a Japanese archive to tell the story; but Rolling Stone notes that this is not “a way of ginning up tabloid dynamism” but rather “a way of defusing dread”.

For Dosa, the point is really to free moviegoers up to dig into the Kraftts’ ethereal work.

You’re bound to think of the couple as romantic heroes after 90 minutes spent with them traversing some of the most dangerous parts of Mother Earth.

Alright, you worked for it. Trailer time:

Fire of Love was released in theatres on July 6.

[sources:indiewire&rollingstone]