30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Volcanic bombs of gas and incandescent materials explode in the air, while the requiem celebrates the memory of the spouses Katia and Maurice Krafft, legendary French filmmakers and volcanologists. At 3:18 pm on 3 June 1991, they are on top of the Uzen volcano in Japan, as always too close to the crater. The Kraffts are perfect Herzogian material, they are two of the tragic heroes who populate his cinema. They live with the constant drive to search for the limit, beyond all those risks they know well, to make a cinematic gesture that embodies the contrast between the beauty of the vital force and the ancestral destructive power of natural energies. They leave a legacy of 200 hours of footage, which Werner Herzog manipulates to create a chilling celebratory work of a ghostly nature. After Into the Inferno and Fireball, the director returns to the geology of craters with The Fire Within, that inner fire that corresponds to an indefinable urge towards life and death.

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  Werner Herzog

  Werner Herzog (1942) is a director, screenwriter, producer and documentary maker, considered one of the most important exponents of the new German cinema. Growing up in a small Bavarian village, he spent his childhood without ever seeing a film. After making his debut as a director at the age of nineteen, he made more than fifty films and documentaries, which earned him international fame and numerous awards, such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), awarded at Cannes, and Signs of Life (1968), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin. The FFDL has already presented many of his works, including Kalachakra, Wheel of Time, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, The Wild Blue Yonder and La Sufrière.