In "Time and Water," archives of film and ice hold memories of a vanishing world

How do you say goodbye to something you thought would last forever? This is the question Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason keeps returning to in Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa’s latest documentary Time and Water. As Andri grieves both the loss of his grandparents and his country’s dwindling glaciers, the film contrasts Iceland’s dying ice—a once-unthinkable reality—with Andri’s own attempts to preserve his family’s memories before they, too, slip away.

“I was so moved by that conflict that he felt,” Dosa recalls. “I thought it was a profound and devastating paradigm for thinking through climate grief and how we make sense of this critical juncture in our planet's history.”

The film is based partly on Andri’s book, “On Time and Water,” which inspired much of the narration. But much like Dosa’s previous film, Fire of Love, it is Andri’s tender, lively archive of family films and photographs—some of them, his, and others shot by his glacier-loving grandparents during their many expeditions onto the ice—that bring the documentary to life. Dosa worked with many of the same editors as on Fire of Love—including Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, joined this time by Mark Harrison—who, together, stitch past and present into a time capsule for an uncertain future. 

“We thought bringing in the power [and] the life force of glaciers was key to then feeling the loss that comes with a death—and same thing, too, in the entangled world of humans,” Dosa says. The result is as awe-inspiring as it is alarming. But as uncertain as our future may seem, the film also leaves open the possibility that things can still change. “The future is not yet written,” she says. “What we do now actually does really matter.”

In an interview ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Dosa spoke about the allure of making another archival film, how Dropbox helped her team stay organized, and the challenge of telling a story that is, quite literally, unfolding at a glacial pace. 

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After Fire of Love, did you always know you wanted to make another film that was so heavily based on archival material? 
Yes and no. Fire of Love was the first archival film that I directed. I feel like it opened the creative doors in a way for me that was really meaningful. The combination of archive and narration—I find that particularly challenging but also particularly interesting. And this seemed like another opportunity to work with both archive and a poetic, subjective style of narration. We didn't, by any means, want to make Ice of Love—which is what we jokingly called this film at first. We really wanted it to be different. But I was really excited to continue playing with some of the themes that we were playing with in Fire of Love—like how geologic time can dialogue with human memory, and how to contend with these forces that seem so much greater than ourselves and find that kind kinship, so to speak, with nature.

What is it about the concept of geological time that you find so interesting?
There's a quote from a writer named Robert Macfarlane—who's kind of a peer of Andri's—who talks about how, with the gaze of deep time or geologic time, things that seem inert to the human eye come alive. A glacier, a mountain, actually do contain a life cycle. There are these kinds of patterns and rhythms. And I think by showing that life force, there's a way that it acts almost like a rebuttal to these really damaging, violent narratives about how the wilderness is a barren wasteland—that there's nothing there. We're hearing, for example, that Greenland is this wasteland, but there's people who have lived there for thousands of years. There's so much richness and life there. So I think that geologic time is a paradigm that can articulate that life force. And to play with it visually and sonically is really exciting to me—to show that, no, this is not a resource to extract. It has its own ontology, its own life. 

I think wherever we can see ourselves in kinship with not just nature but our ancestors from the past and our future descendants, that can conjure a different sense of responsibility and caretaking—not just for the land that sustains us, but also responsibility to future generations, while honoring the past and where we come from at the same time. 

I've been thinking a lot about how you and your team brought the glaciers to life in the film. There's some really incredible images, and I also imagine it must have been a bit of a challenge to capture something that is so massive, that doesn't move in a way humans can perceive. Can you tell me more about how you and the team approached that?
I have an amazing team, both in North America and in Iceland. They were so skilled at finding the right locations, how we could film on glaciers responsibly, ethically, and safely. And then I got to work with an incredible director of photography, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and an incredible sound designer, Björn Viktorsson. We were really talking about this idea of glacial sentience to capture visually and sonically. Pablo, as both a cinematographer and a director, he's so skilled at working specifically with water, fog, ice. He was finding these compositions where you could really feel the motion of the ice and the water, even if the composition seemed still. But since it's so hard to perceive actual movement of glaciers, the only way we could really get at movement without time-lapse images was through sound. And that's where Björn, working with this amazing sound consultant named Konstantin Vlasis, worked with these geophones and hydrophones to capture the sounds of the movement of the ice.  

One of my favorite scenes in the film is where we're in this ice cave and you just hear these creaks and groans. And Andri, through the narration says, like, “This is how a glacier sounds. You can't quite see it, but it's moving.” And so that's how we're really trying to invite the audience into feeling not just the movement but the aliveness of the ice—which, in a film that is about the death of a glacier, we first want you to know it's alive.

How did Dropbox help you and your team bring the film to life? 
Dropbox was extremely useful for us. It housed our everything. We had all these different folders of still photographs, archival material, sound—and not just our field recordings that we took, but also, our glacial sound consultant Konstantin Vlasis would send us stuff too, so his collaborators from across the project would find this digital hub in Dropbox. Our extraordinary composer Dan Deacon would always send us his files via Dropbox—and not just the score for each scene. His music editor, Chester Gwazda, would then send us the MOV files with the music cut in on Dropbox. It was very much embedded into every stage of the process, from production all the way through scoring and to the end. 

There's a quote from Andri in the film where he says “our time is unlike any time before.” I was really struck by his reckoning with these things that we thought we'd never lose are now disappearing—how changes that once took hundreds of thousands of years are now happening in a human lifetime. Those are the things that stuck with me the most, but what do you hope will stick with people most after watching the film?
I hope that that line will very much resonate with people as well. We are living in an unprecedented time when human actions have indelibly changed the earth. It is a radical break unlike any other in thinking about geologic time. But I also hope people can feel the handshake of generations that Andri says in the film—of how our past is not just embedded in the glaciers, but also in these deeply human stories. And how, by embracing these stories, they make dreaming of a habitable future possible. It's through the telling of stories that we can open our minds and gaze, to think: We are living in a time where glaciers are still alive. And knowing the power of a glacier—not thinking of it as just kind of a frozen block of water, but as something that has sentience, that has life force, that is encoded with human meaning.

I hope that the film can relay the sense of possibility, of knowing how powerful nature is—that, yes, we have changed it indelibly in these violent ways that we're feeling the consequences of now, but that we possess the power to make it a more habitable, balanced, just place again. And then, on maybe a more simple note, I just hope people will love their family—whether it's your biological family or chosen family. I hope people will hold their people close in this moment of crisis and preserve what makes us human.

Time and Water premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on January 27. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.