Time and Water Review: Goodbye to All That

From fire to ice: Sara Dosa follows up her 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary about doomed volcanologists, Fire of Love, with a contemplation of Iceland’s melting glaciers and generational memory. Instead of a portrait, Time and Water takes the form of a personal essay, told in first-person narration by Icelandic poet and author Andri Snær Magnason to an audience in an undefined future. 

“I am 53, speaking to you from the year 2026,” he begins. His message to the future will wend in interesting ways as it reflects on the passage of time and the way stories are preserved and handed down in ways both ancient (rimes) and newfangled-however-briefly (a camcorder). But always his message returns to a central, terrifying fact: The glaciers are melting, and that bodes very badly indeed.

The inciting incident is the demise of Ok in 2014, the first-ever glacier to be declared dead, a casualty of global warming. “The future we were worried about is no longer distant, it is here” is how Magnason frames it for his audience of the future – succinct, devastating – which goes some way in explaining why he was commissioned to write a short obituary for the glacier to be engraved on an on-site commemorative plaque (a plaque, he notes, that will likely outlive all the glaciers). But the documentary is not overly consumed with the commission. Rather, it explores Magnason’s personal relationship to Iceland’s land and sky, and how that relationship was shaped by his ancestors – most especially an aunt and uncle who were glaciologists. Magnason’s measured, mostly subdued narration runs more or less nonstop, laid over nature photography, archival footage, and Magnason’s own considerable trove of home videos. (There are also some interstitials that, as in Fire of Love, have a handmade aesthetic that is visually grabby but teeters a little close to cutesy for such a sober topic.)

“Wow, shit.” That’s how Magnason responds to the northern lights on one home video, capturing his and his children’s awe at the night sky. Time and Water offers no shortage of “wow, shit” moments for the viewer, too: As far as armchair sightseeing goes, it’s a stunner. I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspires folks to book a trip to Iceland – not least because, as is grimly made plain here, the clock is ticking. Iceland is on the front lines of the climate crisis, and its landscape and wildlife population are already being impacted. That’s a lot to take in, but Time and Water gives you time to reflect. Even at a short hour and a half runtime, the film can meander like glacier melt; a somewhat sedate pace for such an urgent topic. Intentionally or not, it gives the film the feeling not of a warning, but of a foregone conclusion: a eulogy.

Time and Water opens Friday, June 5 at AFS Cinema.

Time and Water

2026, PG, 93 min. Directed by Sara Dosa.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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