THE STORY – An Icelandic writer preserves vanishing glaciers, departed grandparents, family memories, and flowing time in his personal archives, transforming loss into a time capsule.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Sara Dosa (Director), Andri Snær Magnason, Sara Dosa, Erin Casper, and Jocelyne Chaput (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
“I can’t send you a glacier, but at least I can send you this.”
From these opening lines, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason addresses his children, his children’s children, and any future inhabitants of his beloved Iceland. A sense of loss is settling in, as he is tasked with memorializing the first glacier in Iceland to die. What will be left of his homeland? What will his children, or the children of future generations, be left with? Facing this loss head-on, “Time and Water” serves more as a time capsule than a documentary, a recording of this time to hold a picture of all the stories, images, heartaches, and memories Magnason wants to pass on. He can’t send future generations a glacier, but he can send this message.
Magnason’s narration flows throughout the film, and he partners with Academy Award-nominated director Sara Dosa to bring it to life. Much like Dosa’s previous film, “Fire of Love,” “Time and Water” finds the connective tissue between passion for the natural world and the passions for our loved ones. Dosa’s undeniable visual flair is a perfect match for Magnason’s philosophical reflections. Along with editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, she blends nearly three decades of Magnason’s personal family recordings with gorgeous modern footage of Iceland. Every frame is full to the brim with history, with meaning, and a message for the future. The film isn’t in a rush to get to where it’s going, with the narration taking its time to unfold, but for those patient enough to take it all in, the depth of these memories will hold immense power.
Glaciers are constantly on the move, always moving at their delicate pace, reaching out, stretching into the future, though you wouldn’t know it at a glance. It’s only with the hindsight of time, and the preservation of those memories, that we can see how things have changed. So, he looks to his grandparents, plumbing their memories of their beloved land to hear about adventures among the glaciers. He hears of exciting journeys studying the landscape, a honeymoon in the mountains, and even secret love notes too private to share, even decades later. What gets lost when we fail to preserve these stories? Love for the land is love for the memories. They’re intertwined, inseparable, but that’s easy to forget.
To that end, Magnason begins to look at the present as well. For nearly three decades, he filmed countless moments with a camcorder, documenting his children’s earliest days through to today. There’s something heavenly about connecting the archival film from Magnason’s grandparents to the present-day images of his children. These memories, separated by decades and generations, flow together like a glacier, building upon each other like layers of ice and ash frozen together. It’s a powerful reminder not only to look backward or forward, but also to look for where the two meet.
In less gentle hands, “Time and Water” could feel preachy or told with the wag of a finger. Instead, Magnason doesn’t spend his time with lectures or even offering solutions. That’s not the purpose of a time capsule. He instead reflects on the fleeting nature of…well, everything. What do we pass on when we’re gone? Will future generations hold onto these memories? Are we doomed to oblivion before long? Few documentaries manage to hold the global impact of humanity and the personal impact of a story together in this way.
Just as in ancient tales we still tell or songs passed from generation to generation, “Time and Water” is a meditation on what we leave behind. Even if you’ve never been to Iceland or touched a glacier, “Time and Water” brings the pain of this loss to such a personal place that you can’t help but melt. If you’re a parent, the thought of legacy, or even simply what we teach our kids, is on your mind daily. The film zooms out on a timeline, as though Magnason is stretching one arm into the past and another into the future, trying to touch as much of history as he can. Magnason and Dosa have crafted a deeply personal, monumental documentary, in moments big and small, to leave for future generations.
