Time and Water, Sara Dosa’s new documentary opening in Bay Area theaters Fri/5, was inspired when when she read a 2019 essay in the Guardian entitled, “How do you say goodbye to a glacier?” Andri Snær Magnason’s mournful paean to Iceland’s “dead” Ok glacier ironically excited her: She was a fan of his already—he worked as a consultant on her film The Seer and the Unseen—so she reached out to him.
“He was just about to publish his book On Time and Water,” the filmmaker recalled during an Earth Day conversation at the doc’s local premiere at the SFFILM Festival.
“He sent it to me, and I was just in awe of it, especially how he was able to weave the story of his own family with the story of water in Iceland, as well as on our planet more broadly.”
The writer was not just agreeable to allowing Dosa to make him and his reckoning with climate change the subject of her film. He also allowed her into his family’s archives that include home movies going back decades and his grandfather’s Árni’s 1950s era photographs and films of then-thriving glaciers.
Árni and Magnason’s grandmother Hulda fell in love exploring Iceland’s frozen geology. And their stories—at least until Árni’s memory fades—are among the things that enliven Time and Water, which is at once an elegy to our disappearing natural world, a climate change alarm, a family history, and a love story.
“I’m in search of understanding myself of these mysteries of our world, and I do that by exploring the human relationship with nature,” Dosa said. “I just find it so endlessly full of meaning and full of mystery.
“Having this family that is in awe of glaciers and their grandson Andri, who’s making sense of the life and also the death of glaciers, I find that that pulls me personally into deeper understanding. At the same time, it makes me realize that there’s so much more that I can never fully understand. There’s a paradox there. The more you know, the more you realize you could never know. I feel like that process feels like love, in a way, surrendering to the mystery of it all while seeking to know more and more. And I think that love animates what’s meaningful in life.”
Dosa is American, who until recently made her home in the Bay Area, but Iceland runs through the veins of her last three documentaries. The Seer and the Unseen (2019) looked at the environment and activism through the eyes of a woman who communicates with country’s fairy folk. Fire of Love (2022) spun the tragic romance between volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who followed the magma trail all around the world, including to Iceland.
Time and Water is the most direct in its observation of the calamity brought about by Earth’s changing climate but remains rooted in a lyricism that country of fire and ice inspires.
“I did an artist’s residency in Iceland while I was working on Fire of Love. I think in the back of my mind, I thought, ‘We’re doing fire. Maybe ice is next.’” Dosa said. “I’m just moved by these natural forces like volcanos and glaciers. I think they are in conversation with each other, not just in Iceland but globally.
“In Iceland, the idea that a glacier could die is absolutely surreal,” she adds. “It’s like here in the Bay Area, what if the bay dried up? It’s unthinkable. I think about these surreal circumstances that now seem possible due to the kind of unfathomable losses that we’re experiencing around the world.”
Dosa sees stories and the emotional connection they create as a way to foster understanding of the climate crisis. In Time and Water, the story is that of the Magnason family, her lens widening to encompass the wider implications of the destruction of glaciers and disappearing bird populations. Even at is most distressing, the film retains a certain buoyancy which Dosa credits to the man who led her to take the leap into the current film.
“Andri was like a multi-faceted guide through the archive for our entire team in so many different ways,” she said. “He’s also really funny and brilliant, which is very obvious as soon as you meet him. His sense of humor was key for us in terms of making a story that is ultimately about coming to terms with the death of grandparents and glaciers. He was able to bring so much kind of humor and playfulness into that story.”
The death of glaciers is alarming. The disappearance of seabirds reflected in empty cliffside’s in Time and Water is alarming. The film, while often funny and moving in the way it relates the human story of Magnason’s family and particularly the relationship between Hulda and Árni, is alarming. Dosa is sounding the alarm while there is still time to heed it.
“We need stories that create kind of the imaginative fodder, so to speak, that can prefigure a world where glaciers still exist,” she says. “We have so many stories of doom that make us feel like it’s already foretold that we’ve lost everything due to the climate crisis. But there still is a moment to do something, and we’re in it right now. The science is dire. We can’t ignore it. We can’t exist in a world of naive hope. But we can exist in the uncertainty where the future is not yet fully written.”
Time and Water opens in Bay Area theaters on June 5.
