An Inhabited Volcano

Every forty years or so, the volcano of La Palma in the Canary Islands erupts. The filmmakers, who are natives of the island, had hoped to experience such an eruption one day, without imagining that it would take place only two kilometres from the house of one of their close friends. In September 2021, they travel to La Palma to film, far from the media coverage, and observe with fascination an eminently dazzling and hypnotic phenomenon of unrelenting power. In parallel, they experience the tragedy of this catastrophe, which invades and engulfs everything in its path, threatening both the future and the present of the island’s inhabitants. During the months of the volcano’s activity, they talk on WhatsApp with their circle of friends. It is this intimate material, full of affection and reserved friendship, that underpins the images and invests them with a whole new dimension, producing an extremely fertile tension with a visual register that has to do with the sublime - according to its original definition, that is to say, having to do with nature and phenomena that are beyond human comprehension - until a moving and wonderful final, suspended scene.

Emilie Bujès