“I have never written a memorial for a glacier — no one has,” laments the poet Andri Snær Magnason during Sara Dosa’s “Time and Water.” In 2019, Magnason was given the extraordinary task of writing an epitaph to Iceland’s Okjokull glacier, which was declared “dead” five years earlier. Dosa’s diptych of human existence and geological time scales, constructed largely of home videos and old photographs shot by Magnason and his family, illuminates the fragility of life in a world crumbling under the pressures of global heating. It is at once a sentimental ode to the planet and a plea for personal archivism, one that suggests an intrinsic connection between the two. Framed as a time capsule meant to be watched centuries in the future, Magnason muses, to an audience of hypothetical descendants, “I cannot send you a glacier. But at least I can send you this.” With voiceovers that balance lyrical imagery with bone-dry wit, “Time and Water” threads a delicate needle between cultural and lithologic memory. Boisterous tales from Magnason’s four adventurous grandparents (and their meticulous documentation of rural Iceland) fit comfortably alongside Dosa’s quiet images of melting glaciers, whose patterns and movements reveal eons of history. Tactile photographs and personal film reels capture the milestones of human lifespan — from first steps to young love to 80th birthdays — that the movie gently juxtaposes with records of volcanic eruptions trapped beneath the ice, a natural library of Earth’s tumultuous past. “Time and Water” threads a delicate needle between cultural and lithologic memory. In a world of climate crises, both glaciers and people are defined by impermanence; according to Magnason, losing them isn’t something for which one can fully prepare. The fading of recollections in old age — a slow and painful process the author dares to capture on video — are compared to the waning shape and thickness of glacial ice, destined to melt faster than it can be replenished. When Dosa presents once-mighty glaciers as lonely blocks adrift at sea, it’s hard not to personify them, as they recall the terrifying sensation of feeling lost within the expanse of one’s own mind. And yet, the director and her poet subject still strive to find new forms of time travel to commune with the dead, if only to hold on to some glimmer of hope. They connect with the past through vivid Icelandic folk tales and recordings of grandmothers singing rímur — ancient songs passed down for nearly a millennium — as Magnason reflects on the many stars that had to align before these old women’s disembodied voices found their way to him on tape, and eventually to us through the medium of film.
In “Time and Water,” every sound and texture is an archive, and every archive is a stirring reminder of beauty and loss. There is continuity of remembrance between Dosa’s new footage and Magnason’s old family films — a spiritual transference that imbues images of nature with profound personal meaning. Where most environmental films announce their calls to action through warnings and statistics, Dosa opts for wistful aesthetic pleas to preserve the natural world as a keeper of human time and an intrinsic part of Iceland’s cultural memory. It forces you to not only bear witness to terrestrial loss, but to feel its devastation deep in your bones, as though a member of your own family were slipping away.
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