Sara Dosa’s Iceland documentary explores memory, glaciers and generations

Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s family archive becomes a time capsule in the documentary On Time and Water, directed by Sara Dosa, mbl.is reports. The film will have its Icelandic premiere on August 27.

As glaciers melt and grandparents disappear, the film seeks to preserve memories, stories, time and water that are rapidly vanishing. It has already been screened in several countries.

Dosa spoke to mbl.is from Los Angeles while preparing to travel to Iceland for the premiere. She has visited the country at least 20 times.

People and nature

Dosa said she greatly enjoyed working with Magnason and many other Icelanders on the film.

She said the project began after she read a 2019 article by Magnason in The Guardian, in which he considered how people say goodbye to a glacier.

“This profound question struck me, especially in these times of climate threat,” Dosa said. She had long admired Magnason and was familiar with his writing about nature and the relationship between people and the natural world.

She eventually contacted him, and they began discussions that continued for several years. During that time, the Covid pandemic began, Magnason completed his book On Time and Water, and Dosa made her documentary Fire of Love. They later resumed their conversations, which ultimately led to the film.

Dosa first met Magnason in 2015. She previously made The Seer & The Unseen, a 2019 documentary connected to Iceland about Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic woman with clairvoyant abilities, and her relationship with hidden people and nature conservation.

Environmental issues are a recurring concern in Dosa’s work, and she often examines the relationship between people and nature. She received an Oscar nomination for Fire of Love.

“I am always looking for stories that spark discussions about the relationship between people and nature. Such stories move me, and I become excited to follow them,” she said.

A unique climate story

On Time and Water contains a large collection of photographs and video recordings from Magnason’s private archive, which Dosa used while making the film.

Dosa said the work began during an artist residency in Húsafell. The team wanted to be close to the place where the Ok glacier had once stood before disappearing.

“There we began discussing how we could combine Andri Snær’s story with the story of Icelandic glaciers today,” she said.

The team agreed that it wanted to tell a distinctive climate story that mapped both a personal history and the history of generations. At the same time, it wanted to show that glaciers record and preserve the planet’s memories.

“By using Andri Snær’s photo archive, we manage to make human emotions visible and highlight the parallel that, just like people’s lives, glaciers preserve traces of the past,” Dosa said.

“We always try to weave together the personal and the ecological and draw out the connections between them.”