Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.
How do you say goodbye to what you never thought you could lose? That’s the question Magnason grapples with in Sara Dosa’s ambitious new project following her 2022 Sundance Film Festival breakout FIRE OF LOVE. Tasked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change, Magnason reflects on how glaciers create an archive of deep time within their ice over millions of years. Likening this idea of the depth of time to intergenerational memory, he sets out to pass along the stories of his grandparents for future generations, before they too vanish. Drawing from an evocative mix of photographs, home movies, myths, songs, and folk tales, TIME AND WATER is at once an elegy for what we’ve lost and an attempt at cinematic time travel to retain it.
“Magnificent…. A nature doc mixed with autobiography, TIME AND WATER is 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 — one that shows how craven capitalism over the last several hundred years has destroyed her, not just for the present, but for the future as well.” —Marya E. Gates, IndieWire “The film takes the form of a video time capsule created by Magnason and addressed to a viewer some time in the future. 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 Daily “TIME AND WATER helps us understand the environment through the energetic devotion of the people who inhabit it…. Stands as a stirring record of human hopes and regrets.” —Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com
