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

  A director, screenwriter, producer, and documentary maker, he is considered one of the most important exponents of New German Cinema. He has also written books and directed operas. Signs of Life (1968) won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is among his best-known films. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. This was followed by Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978) and Woyzeck (1979). Fitzcarraldo (1982) won the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2010 he was president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival.