Pele and The Fire Within

The Big Island’s Kilauea Volcano

Award-Winning **VIDEO**

Lance Page
PageFilms.com 

“She is Pele-honua-mea, Pele of the Sacred Land.  She is Pele, the eater of land, when she devours the land with her flames.

She who rules the volcanoes of Hawai’i, and Mankind has no power to resist her.  When Pele is heard from, her word is the final word.”

The Fire Within is my visceral and artistic study of the Big Island of Hawaii’s hyperactive Kilauea volcano.  

I was born and raised on the island.  All my life I hadn’t had the chance to come face to face with her incredible presence until last year.

Many in Hawaii refer to the lava as ‘Pele’, the Hawaiian goddess of fire.  

After my incredible experience at the volcano it’s not hard to see why so many islanders to this day see her as a living, breathing thing.  I wanted to capture her beauty and mysteriousness as well as her unimaginable power in the best way that I knew how.  I wanted to just see her doing what she does. I shied away from any human interaction and turned my camera on the fiery blood of the Earth.

It is said if you want to protect yourself and your family from the lava flow, you have to pay your respects to Pele, the volcano goddess.  

According to local legends, she appears as a beautiful woman with long, flowing hair or an older woman with long, white hair and accompanied by a dog, and you must greet her with aloha and offer her help or respite to avoid her violent temper.  To really get on her good side, however, you must visit her at the crater, offering her food and flowers to settle her down.

This six and a half minute film is my best attempt at capturing what it felt like to witness molten rock slowly burning down a dense wet rainforest, or to peer into the six-hundred-foot-wide lava lake at Kilauea’s summit crater.

Kilauea is the most active volcano in Hawaii and possibly the world.  I’ve never been anywhere else on the planet that demanded as much respect and awareness for the natural environment around me.

Her unexpected beauty and unsettling sense of danger were nothing short of humbling– and put so much of my short, temporal life into perspective.

~Via Lance Page, Herb Kawainui Kane, Olukai/Nick Selway