EXCLUSIVE: Iceland, according to legend, was given its name by Norse explorers who encountered the country’s frozen landscape more than a millennia ago. But with climate change melting its glaciers, what is to become of Iceland’s identity? What is to become of the planet as a whole?
These are among the urgent themes of Time and Water, the new documentary from Oscar nominee Sara Dosa (Fire of Love). Her film is inspired by the book On Time and Water by celebrated Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, who serves as narrator of the film. In 2019, Magnason wrote an obituary for Okjökull, the first glacier in Iceland to be declared moribund after it lost much of its thickness and surface area.
National Geographic is partnering with 1-2 Special and Dogwoof to release Time and Water in theaters globally beginning May 29. Watch the exclusive trailer for the film above.
National Geographic
“In Time and Water, renowned Icelandic poet and author Andri Snær Magnason is chasing something elusive,” notes a release. “As the glacial ice of his homeland melts, he constructs a time capsule to hold onto this moment and send it to the future, before everything he loves slips away. Using his own collected archives, his grandparents’ photographs and films, as well as traditional songs and folktales, Andri interlaces his family’s story with that of the land around him. The film is a universal reflection on the power of home and what it means to be alive amid profound epochal change.”
The documentary is produced by Oscar winner Shane Boris (Navalny, Fire of Love), Elijah Stevens, Jameka Autry, and Sara Dosa. Executive producers include National Geographic’s Carolyn Bernstein and Tim Horsburgh, along with Jessica Harrop, Caitlin Mae Burke, Kristín Ólafsdóttir, Nina Fialkow, Moudhy Al-Rashid, And Sam Frohman.
“Time and Water is a deeply moving and timely cri de coeur that invites audiences to reflect on the ties that bind us to the natural world and to each other,” said Bernstein, EVP of National Geographic Documentary Films. “As with Fire of Love, Sara and her team’s unique creative vision and spirit of collaboration bring emotional depth, dramatic urgency and spectacular cinematography to a story that speaks to generations past, present and future.”
Along with Time and Water and Fire of Love, Dosa’s directing credits include The Seer and the Unseen, which she also filmed in Iceland.
“Time and Water weaves a story of family and our natural landscapes as an effort to make sense of our profoundly changing world,” Dosa said in a statement. “We were inspired by how memory is carried across time, through family archives and cultural myths, in the land and the ice itself. Our film reveals how human life is inseparable from nature, bringing the distant future into intimate focus and inviting audiences to imagine, act, and feel a love for a world beyond their own lifetimes.”
Magnason – a novelist, essayist, playwright and filmmaker– serves as a co-producer of the documentary.
“When speaking about the climate crisis, a scientist once said to me: ‘People don’t understand data, they understand stories,’” Magnason commented. “Sara is a masterful, poetic storyteller, who has brought my family’s stories and experiences into a larger conversation about time, memory and our relationship to the environment. The film is a love letter to glaciers and generations, an invitation to us all to consider how we listen to the world as it changes around us.”
Time and Water held its world premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The expected Oscar contender has since screened around the world, including at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York, and Full Frame in Durham, NC. The film will debut on National Geographic and stream on Disney+ later this year.
“I make films about how humans seek meaning with the more‑than‑human natural world — often through explorations of allegory, metaphor, and myth,” Dosa writes in a director’s statement. “Central to this work is an inquiry into time: cultural temporalities, geologic scales, and seasonal rhythms that entangle human lives within the living systems around us, revealing our shared ecological kinships.”
Dosa adds, “In a time when the violence of the climate crisis ravages the earth, we need stories that can act as maps for our shifting world. Time and Water is a gesture toward such a map, one that traces the ice of Iceland through the human story of one family, anchored by the first-person perspective and expansive archives of celebrated writer Andri Snaer Magnason.”
Time and Water is presented by National Geographic Documentary Films and Sandbox Films in association with Ninmah Foundation. The film is a Signpost Pictures Production in association with Compass Films.
Watch the trailer above.
