Time and Water

Sara Dosa (Fire of Love) turns her attentions from volcanoes to glaciers in this singular, personal collaboration with the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason. Twice in the film, Magnason must write an obituary. Once for his father, and once for Iceland’s Okjökull (Ok) glacier, for a plaque that was placed on the mountainside after the glacier was pronounced dead (Dosa shows mourners gathering for the funeral in 2019).

Time and Water explores how we measure lives, and time, through our interactions with our aging parents and children (the Magnason home movies stretch back across the decades), and, also, with the waxing and waning of the seasons… Glaciers ebb and flow, they too are living things — but climate change diminishes them, and already some have been extinguished. The sense of loss for those who have grown up alongside them runs deep. In one sequence we visit an Icelandic museum preserving the water from the country’s major glaciers for future generations, and the film too is framed as a time capsule, an environmental memento mori for the Anthropocene.

Time and Water strikingly and cinematically explores the life and death of landscapes and human mortality alike… images invite audiences to pause, consider the passage of time, and experience an elegiac sense of loss.

Pat Mullen, POV magazine

A poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.

Grade A, Mary E Gates, IndieWire

It’s a pensive, reflective film which combines striking Super 16 archive material with a deft exploration of the way the narratives of our lives are intertwined with the lands we inhabit.

Wendy Ide, Screen International