‘Time and Water’ Review: A Haunting Essay on Climate Change, Family, and a Disappearing World

How can I tell the future the extent of what we have lost if that future might not even exist?” is the question posed by Andri Snær Magnason, the narrator and, in his own way, the somewhat invisible protagonist of Time and Water, a hybrid documentary–essay film in which the Icelandic writer intertwines the story of his family with that of the disappearance of his country’s glaciers. The result is a film that, in a poetic register, dives headlong into one of the defining issues of the contemporary world: climate change and the profound transformations it is unleashing on the planet.

Sara Dosa and Magnason steer clear of the conventions of the classic environmental documentary or overt political advocacy. Their approach is intimate and personal, rooted in the history of a family—and of a nation—for whom glaciers are central to life, an everyday part of both ecosystem and culture. Magnason, an award-winning Icelandic author, has spent years documenting his family history through home videos, a practice he inherited from one of his grandfathers, who shared the same habit of filming much of his life. Those materials are woven into the film alongside Magnason’s own recordings.

Magnason traces the lives of his grandparents across decades and connects them to those of his children (his parents are curiously absent), all of them in constant contact with nature and with the glaciers of their small country. His narration takes the form of a letter to the future, a message in a bottle addressed to generations to come—those who will know whether ours managed to do anything to avert the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the melting and disappearance of glaciers, with all that entails for the planet.

Time and Water does not explain or preach. In fact, it never addresses the issue in explicitly activist terms. Instead, it adopts a personal perspective, taking as its point of departure the “death” of one of Iceland’s glaciers, Ok—the country’s smallest—which gradually melted due to global warming until it ceased to exist as such. Magnason was asked to write a text for a commemorative plaque for the glacier, and it is from reflecting on that inscription that much of the film’s historical and personal meditation emerges, leading him to revisit his own life story.

“I don’t know if the death of a glacier will seem as historic to you as it does to me,” the writer says in voiceover. “To me it feels like the horizon collapsing. The future we were warned about is no longer far away. It’s already here. We’re out of time.” In more ways than one, Dosa’s film functions as a snapshot of the present sent forward to whoever might see—and read—it in a time when Iceland, and quite possibly the world, will be very different from what it is today. The generational passage from grandparents to great-grandchildren seeks to bridge the past with a generation that may yet witness what the world looks like in the 22nd century.

The director of Fire of Love continues here in the same poetic vein as that earlier film, which coincidentally shared the moment with another volcano documentary by Werner Herzog. What’s striking about Time and Water is that, given its subject, characters, and especially Magnason’s heavily accented English narration, it also carries a distinctly herzogian air. Alongside its extraordinary archival materials, the film features striking contemporary images of Iceland’s glaciers shot by cinematographer Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, complemented by an original electronic score by Dan Deacon. Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and produced by National Geographic, Time and Water is a melancholy elegy for a world disappearing before our eyes.