Documentary director Sara Dosa turns her attention to Iceland’s receding ice in Time and Water, a film that stitches family memory, geology, and climate loss into a quiet, urgent portrait. Shot mostly around the Vatnajökull ice cap in southern Iceland and the former Okjökull glacier in the west, the film premiered at Sundance in January 2026 and centers on Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and the lives of his grandparents, Hulda and Árn, whose decades together were framed by trips onto the ice.
Dosa, who grew up in Northern California, says Iceland first called to her through its music—artists like Björk, Sigur Rós, and Múm—and then through photographs of its landscape. That fascination has fed a body of documentary work focused on how people relate to powerful, changing environments: Fire of Love (about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft), Seer and the Unseen (about an Icelandic seer who communes with huldufólk), and now Time and Water.
Her collaboration with Magnason began during Seer and the Unseen, and continued after she read his 2019 piece about how to say goodbye to a glacier. Magnason had also published the book On Time and Water and wrote the metal plaque commemorating Okjökull—an emblem of the glacier’s loss that now sits on the volcano where the ice once lay. Those earlier conversations and writings shaped Dosa’s approach to making this film.
Time and Water interleaves archival home movies and photos of Hulda and Árn with contemporary footage of glaciers in decline. The ice becomes more than backdrop; it reads like a character in the family’s story. Hulda and Árn’s early expeditions—Hulda was joining treks in 1956, long before that was common for women—turn into honeymoon snapshots, recurring escapes, and finally vanishing terrain. As the ice retreats, the film compresses decades of experience into layered reminiscence: a portrait of love and adventure rendered against the physical erosion of place.
Dosa treats the landscape with a kind of reverence: slow, careful frames track the texture of ice, the sound of glacial movement, and the play of light across glassy surfaces. Archival audio and imagery anchor the family’s presence while the gradual memorializing of Okjökull —its obituary-like plaque—signals the film’s elegiac thread. The result is less a lecture about climate change than a meditation on loss: personal, cultural, and planetary.
Working on these projects has changed how Dosa looks at the world. She speaks about learning to see geology and the age of the earth with the same curiosity she once reserved for mountain scenery. Her previous film work, particularly on the Seer and the Unseen, primed her to consider the land as sentient in cultural imagination—an idea she uses here to suggest that glaciers are woven into Iceland’s stories and identity.
Production on Iceland’s glaciers demanded patience and local expertise. The weather swings wildly—sudden storms, gale-force winds, and rapid shifts from sun to sleet—so Dosa’s team relied on Icelandic guides and a crew that included drone and camera operators and a director of photography. The local knowledge often made the difference: moments that seemed lost to weather would resolve in five minutes as skies cleared and a shaft of light illuminated the ice.
Some shoots tested the crew’s limits. On the banks of Jökulsárlón, fierce winds and sticky mud made a crucial shot feel perilous. Assistant camera operator Róbert Magnússon braced a tripod leg and physically supported the director of photography, Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, while Dosa tried to shield him and monitor the framing. They sank into the mud together and, after getting the shot, staged a small rescue to pull equipment and crew free. Those difficult, sweaty moments, Dosa says, felt intimate and exhilarating: the team learning the land’s demands while trying to honor it visually.
Throughout, Time and Water aims to widen the frame: it tells one family’s story while pointing to what’s at stake for entire communities and landscapes. By treating glaciers as active participants in Icelandic life—places of courtship, work, ritual, and memory—the film invites viewers to consider what it means to lose not just ice, but the stories it holds.
Dosa’s work resists easy sentimentalism. Instead, it offers a patient, layered elegy—one that asks audiences to witness how personal histories are embedded in geological time and what is lost when those anchor points disappear. The film is both a tribute to Hulda and Árn’s life together and a careful record of a landscape that is changing faster than many of us can imagine.
