Somber Rumination on the Continued Decay of Iceland is Stunning, But Glacial

There’s a misleading calm to Time and Water, the most recent documentary from Fireplace of Love director Sara Dosa. Over meditative cinematography of melting ice and flowing rivers by Pedro Alvarez Mesa, Icelandic multi-platform author Andri Snær Magnason waxes poetic in regards to the dying of the glaciers. Although these photos are magisterial, Magnason is, understandably, somber and mournful. His beloved nation’s pure panorama is being destroyed, and with it, the bodily manifestations of his generational reminiscences.

Time and Water is an elegiac movie of uncompromising magnificence. Magnason, who wrote and supplies the movie’s cogent commentary, lulls us right into a rueful, but stress-free state of reflection. That is not all the time a superb factor. His strategy to the fabric, and Dosa’s capturing of his observations as a rule body the fast deterioration of the glaciers as a part of a pure course of. By the point Magnason has associated the dying of Iceland’s ice caps to international warming, the movie has misplaced its means to be a clarion name.

Time and Water’s Easy Poetry Dangers Sabotaging Its Bigger Message

To be honest, that does not essentially appear to be Magnason’s intention. Extra prominently, Time and Water is an effort to tie the fading of glaciers to the fading of time, and in that respect, the Nationwide Geographic documentary is stirring, making the massiveness of local weather change really feel intimate and private. However the film’s sole metaphor is hammered incessantly, and, consequently, it’s glacial-paced and much too somnambulant in tone to make its influence.

Through the years, Magnason has perpetually filmed nearly all the pieces: his grandparents, his youngsters, his spouse, and the Icelandic vistas and ice peaks. Time and Water is framed as an open letter or time capsule to his youngsters, a Herculean effort to assist them perceive the world that preceded them. He does this on two fronts: the declining panorama and the declining reminiscence of his elders. The connection between this stuff is charming in illustration, if repetitious and apparent.

The movie works finest when specializing in the home slightly than the pure area, his love for his grandparents and the remainder of his household so palpable it transcends the sunshine contact of his lilted voiceover. He explains the monumental legacy of his household and the unusual irony of getting relations which have traversed ice that he’s now compelled to eulogize. In 2014, he grew to become the “first” of his household to must say goodbye to a glacier, when the Okay Glacier had melted to some extent it might now not be categorized as such. It’s the first to be misplaced to local weather change.

Time and Water balances chilly info with the nice and cozy remembrances of household. It is a correlation that repeatedly works, however the movie needs extra number of spirit.

As Magnason and different glaciologists clarify, that is solely a harbinger of issues to return. We’re anticipated to lose all glaciers inside 200 years, if not sooner. On the identical time that Dosa and Magnason digest this bitter information, they revel within the tenacity of nature to persist, unable to withstand admiring the flowers and bushes which sprout the place ice as soon as was.

Time and Water balances chilly info with the nice and cozy remembrances of household. It is a correlation that repeatedly works, however the movie needs extra number of spirit. The little point out it makes of human contributions to environmental decay feels shoehorned in, nearly just like the filmmakers forgot they had been alleged to name consideration to it.

For all of its harsh actuality, Time and Water is in the end a name for hope. The cinematic equipment is ready to immortalize even all that we purpose to destroy. If it is obscure the passage of time and the dying of ice as tragic, Magnason supposes, then possibly a loving appraisal of intergenerational reminiscence is right here to choose up the slack, all captured on movie for posterity, for all generations to know what as soon as was, within the effort to assist it come again.

Time and Water screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.