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Sara Dosa has accomplished it once more. After “Fireplace of Love,” a few love triangle between a French scientist couple and volcanoes, wowed Sundance 2022 and was scooped up by NatGeo, which took it to an Oscar nomination, Dosa went again to a different mission that had been back-burnered through the pandemic. She had consulted with author/poet/eco-activist Andri Snær Magnason on the Icelandic movie “The Seer and the Unseen” (2019), and now for her newest movie “Time and Water” (NatGeo), premiering at Sundance 2026, she reconnected with him after the world opened up once more.
Magnason was a part of a protest motion to guard a lava area that was threatened by a “unnecessary, absurd highway development mission,” stated Dosa on Zoom. “Everyone instructed me, ‘it’s important to meet Andri.’ He’s one of many massive leaders of environmentalism in Iceland. He writes poetry and science fiction in addition to environmental journalism. He additionally ran for president in Iceland.”
“Time and Water” focuses extra on Magnason’s intimate relationships in a household obsessed not with volcanoes, however glaciers. “His perspective is cosmic,” stated Dosa. “He’s ready to attract all these connections between issues and in some way make them really feel emotional and human unexpectedly.”
It was when he wrote concerning the funeral for Iceland’s first lifeless glacier that Dosa renewed their connection. “The article was entitled, ‘How do you say goodbye to a glacier?’” stated Dosa. “That hit me as such a profound idea and a brand new language for our new instances. How do we are saying goodbye to those issues throughout us that so many people are grappling with, the local weather disaster, or COVID? There’s so many examples of unparalleled loss that persons are experiencing, and we don’t have languages or rituals to do this. I assumed, ‘How essential and significant and in addition human it may very well be to attempt to put in kinship a narrative of a glacier and a narrative of a household by way of a cinematic lens.’”
After Magnason noticed “Fireplace of Love,” he instructed Dosa concerning the archive of his grandparents, who photographed Iceland’s glaciers. “Andre’s grandparents had beautiful imagery of the glaciers that additionally captured this time, when it was earlier than individuals knew glaciers had been disappearing. There’s one thing with the gaze of their digital camera the place you’re feeling this boundlessness, this countless expanse.”
In summer season 2023, Dosa and her producers Shane Boris and Elijah Stevens flew to Iceland to fulfill with Snær Magnason and look by way of his archives. As quickly as they noticed the footage, they had been in, and so they managed to indicate NatGeo some footage to influence the distributor to again the mission.
The wealthy household video archive “was not nearly glaciers, but in addition about people,” stated Dosa. “There’s such a transparent by way of line there to speak about human reminiscence, in addition to planetary reminiscence, encased in glaciers in a manner that felt thrilling to us as filmmakers. And the by way of line is love.”
Much like “Fireplace of Love,” the themes of “Time and Water” are in love with the extremes of nature. And narrator Magnason carries the story of the movie, as did Miranda July for “Fireplace of Love.” He shares a writing credit score with Dosa and her editors Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput as they found out continually altering iterations of the jigsaw puzzle of footage and narration.
They used Magnason’s 2019 ebook “On Time and Water” as a information. “However the movie just isn’t an adaptation of the ebook,” stated Dosa. “It’s a companion to the ebook. However we did have language that we might pull from right here and there. We might ship him cuts fairly steadily, and so he would give notes on cuts. And we’d ship him scripts to file the narration on a regular basis. And so we all the time had cycles of latest stuff going to him, after which he would e mail it again to us, after which we might attempt to incorporate his voice into the lower.”
Capturing on glaciers is a dangerous enterprise, however Dosa and her crew had glacial guides who knew when to tug them out for climate. “They’re fluent in Glacier,” she stated. “So all of us felt very secure with them. We had a rare Director of Images named Pablo Alvarez Mesa, who’s expert at photographing methods of water, fog, waterfalls, streams, and ice on each digital codecs in addition to on 16mm. And so we had been capturing on a Bolex and we had been capturing on an Ari to seize each the grandiosity, the magic of the ice, in addition to on the Bolex that was meant to dialog with the archival materials and be a bridge between instances. Pablo was ready to do this in these precarious landscapes the place we had been simply being battered by the wind and the snow.”
Initially of the movie we see mysterious blue objects that we are able to’t determine, as Magnason’s voice addresses an individual sooner or later, maybe a descendant. “He’s welcoming the longer term recipients of our movie to this time capsule that he’s created,” stated Dosa. “And our hope is that you just’ll be intrigued by this mysterious panorama that you just would possibly understand is ice, however you’ll be connecting to this concept that he’s saying, ‘We’ll by no means meet as a result of we dwell in numerous instances. I can’t ship you a glacier, however at the least I can ship you this.’”
By the movie’s finish, Magnason says, “I ponder what would occur in 200 years to my nation, realizing there probably received’t be glaciers? Would saying the title Iceland be summoning a ghost?”
“It’s as much as us; what we do now makes a distinction if there will probably be ice in Iceland,” stated Dosa, choking again tears, “grappling with the gap between now and the speculative future.”
Dosa is aware of that we’re all confronted with the ravages of the local weather disaster, “erratically, relying on our circumstances,” she stated, “however there’s profound loss throughout us, and it’s been difficult to work on a movie about grief after we’re all experiencing grief.”
Subsequent up: Dosa has just a few shorts she’s producing, in addition to “Daughters of the Forest,” from Mexican director Otilia Portillo Padua, set to premiere at South by Southwest. They’re additionally within the early levels of improvement on a mission about cyclical earthquakes in Mexico Metropolis. “On September 19, three completely different years, there have been main earthquakes, which is baffling,” stated Dosa. “Once more, it offers with themes of geologic time and reminiscence. This one will discover the legacies of colonial violence in Mexico as effectively, but in addition up to date life and what it means to dwell in a spot the place the earth might cut up open, and what comes forth from these ruptures.”
“Time and Water” world premieres at Sundance on January 27 at 11:30 MT on the Library Middle Theatre.
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