On May 29, 2026, Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa released her documentary, “Time and Water,” a film that focuses on Andri Snær Magnason’s journey and the effects of climate change on Iceland’s glaciers.
“In 2019, I came across an article in The Guardian ‘How do you say goodbye to a glacier?’ The question struck me as profoundly moving. When I noticed Andri’s name on the byline, I immediately thought: there’s a film here,” Dosa said.
What drew Dosa to Magnason’s work was not just her fascination with landscape, memory and the ways human and more-than-human nature relate to both, but also Magnason’s passion for finding new ways to tell stories about climate change.
“[Magnason’s] writing about glaciers is packed with love stories from his grandparents, childhood nostalgia, and intimate details that make it a profoundly Icelandic read, while also achieving universality,” Dosa said. “After watching many hours of his family recordings and photographs, I knew a film had the potential to affect audiences in the same way his writing had affected me.”
“Time and Water” approaches climate change through memory and family history rather than statistics. Dosa’s approach was to make a film that audiences could connect with on a personal level.
“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,” Dosa said. “Our film is a gesture toward such a map, one that traces the ice of Iceland through the human story of Andri’s family. What we remember will always be attached to the landscapes we roam. Our identities, always rooted on what is gone and what remains.”
Dosa classifies her film as polytemporal, existing across multiple timescales at once. Her team’s cinematography focused on how time is expressed through the systems of water including glaciers, fog, rivers and the sea.
“The associative flow of these images evokes subjective memory, echoing how glaciers themselves hold the frozen layered imprints of planetary history,” Dosa said. “It was very challenging to find the right structure that could both speak a flowing feel we wanted for a film about water and time, and also because there is something about the messy beauty of life collected in archives that defies narrative convention.”
Iceland is one of Dosa’s favorite places on earth. While filming the documentary, she was immersed in the natural world that taught her new forms of understanding.
“We were constantly in awe of our surroundings, attempting to find the best ways to honor them in the transformation to film,” Dosa said. “It was devastating and profound to feel both the power and the precarity of glaciers; to feel at once how small we were as humans and yet the outsized power humans now have in so radically shaping natural rhythms and catalyzing the climate crisis that we are now in.”
Dosa’s films often focus on how humans seek meaning with the more-than-human natural world. As a filmmaker, these themes are central to her work.
“These are all important aspects of my filmmaking because with them I aim to open narrative spaces for dreaming beyond the dominant paradigms that frame nature — and the people connected to it — as something to conquer or extract,” Dosa said. “I want these films to move with emotion and cinematic sensory power that viscerally shows us that kinship extends beyond humanity — to glaciers and to all forces of nature.”
With “Time and Water” released worldwide, Dosa hopes viewers understand the uncertainty of the world and recognize that the future continues to be shaped by the present.
“While themes of solastalgia (the emotional distress produced by environmental change) and grief run through the film, we intend it to land on a note of agentive uncertainty.” Dosa said. “The future is unwritten, and what we do now matters.”
