Sara Dosa
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“We Can Keep Living in a Glacial World”: Sara Dosa on Time and Water
A splendid yet elegiac homage to dying, receding, failing, yet magnificent glaciers, Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, a documentary produced with National Geographic and Sandbox Films, is awe-inspiring precisely because it makes you feel helpless to move. That’s what awe is, after all. The film makes use of a treasure trove of archival materials, some of it supplied by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his family, who lived a lot of their lives recording them and raising posterity alongside the glaciers. Standing still with these images and sounds (in front of the largest screen only, please) and catching snippets of […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 27, 2026 -
Eruptions: Fire of Love Director Sara Dosa Interviewed by Director and Author Sandi Tan
“I couldn’t love someone who doesn’t share that love at the top of a volcano,” says French volcanologist Katia Krafft early in Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, a film that’s both a spectacular, eye-searing documentary about the history and science of volcanoes and achingly existential romance. Katia, a geochemist, and partner Maurice Krafft, a geologist, met, fell in love and—“disappointed in humanity” —turned away from the tumult of the 1960s to find a life on the outskirts of the primordial, amidst drifting ash and near-psychedelic lava pools. “We contemplate lying at the edge of the abyss,” Katia says. Like today’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 14, 2022 -
Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Fire of Love, Every Day in Kaimukī and Shorts
Derrida’s “archival turn” of the ’90s has officially taken over mainstream documentary filmmaking—a trend that has been covered in general interest thinkpieces in Indiewire as well as in academic scholarship, and one that’s proven more lucrative than I could have ever imagined. For the second year in a row, Sundance opened its U.S. Documentary competition selections with a blockbuster archival film, and National Geographic Documentary Films won the bidding frenzy for Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love with a “mid-seven figures” purchase almost a year after reports that 2021 Sundance “Day One” film Summer of Soul sold for north of $12 […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 24, 2022 -
“The Pandemic Sparked a Deeper Contemplation Into Our Creative Process” | Sara Dosa, Fire of Love
The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year? Fire of Love is the first archival film I’ve ever directed—my previous two independent films I directed were primarily vérité. Fire of Love producer Shane Boris, assistant producer […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2022 -
From Maya Deren to Midnight Traveler: San Francisco International Film Festival 2019
Few things at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM for short) felt more San Francisco than being at the packed-to-the-rafters Castro Theatre on Good Friday to cast one’s eyes recklessly into the image pool rippling across the 24-foot-high screen. The visuals belonged to Maya Deren, the mystical dynamo of American independent cinema, whose core of 16mm work (At Land, The Very Eye of Night, Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meshes of the Afternoon) is a motherlode of the avant-garde, and fervent evidence of a mid-century bohemia that bloomed on the West Coast, a legacy kept alive through outfits […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 30, 2019
