Sara Dosa‘s journey with her new film Time and Water began in 2019, when she read an essay by Andri Snaer Magnason titled “How Do You Say Goodbye to a Glacier?” As Dosa tells Gold Derby, the piece “just struck me as such a profound question for this time of tumult.”
Published in The Guardian, the essay examined the melting of Iceland’s Okjökull (aka Ok) glacier not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a personal one. The historic site had special meaning for Magnason’s family, particularly his grandparents, who had been visiting it for decades. “I feel like so many people are grappling with the loss of our landscapes, of our homes,” Dosa says, even “something like a glacier,” which Magnason and his family “felt was eternal,” yet turned out not to be. The piece dealt with “these questions of time and loss, as well as love, and what we choose to transmit at such a critical juncture in history.”
In fact, Magnason was a consultant on Dosa’s 2019 documentary The Seer and the Unseen, which similarly dealt with Icelandic environmentalism. “I loved his work,” Dosa continues. “I love the way he thinks about the world, particularly how he approaches such massive and overwhelming concepts like the climate crisis. So I got very excited about the possibility of turning his work into a film.” And so, Dosa set her sights on creating a cinematic companion piece to Magnason’s book On Time and Water, tying the death of the glacier to the loss of the author’s grandparents.
Dosa recalls that she and Magnason, as well as her entire filmmaking team, “had some bonding moments at the very beginning of the process, which I really think helped to solidify a collaborative basis for working.” The team went on a creative retreat to a renovated farm house near the Ok glacier, where “we just talked about all of our interests, the things that drew us to the story.” Working together, they talked through how the film “could come out in a way that felt very visual and aesthetically moving and interesting.”
Magnason’s input was invaluable during the two-year process of combing through hours of his family’s home video at the glacier through the decades, what Dosa calls “this incredible trove of archival footage.” “While my editors and I were working with the footage,” Dosa says, “we would often ask him [Magnason], ‘We came across this piece of footage. We don’t know what it means. Can you please tell us?’ That would turn into a beautiful story that would shape not just how we approached the edit, but some of the initial writing.”
From the outset, Dosa felt it was important to keep the focus on Magnason’s family. “I’m really inspired by a lot of the literature that’s being done around finding these very personal avenues into that issue, that can then kind of show the human meanings and resiliences, as well as the violences and the costs,” she says. “That can make something feel tangible and emotional, rather than cause you to back away from it because it’s just too big.”
The ultimate goal for the director, Dosa explains, was “to map a human story onto the landscape itself, in an attempt to bring out a deeper sense of meaning, and to make a glaciers death feel thinkable.”
To drive the idea of a glacier as a living, breathing entity home, Dosa included several visceral sequences filmed inside ice caves. “I had the wonderful fortune of working with an incredible team [that] was able to find the safe ways to get inside these beautiful, precarious, and quite frankly dangerous locations,” she says. “We were working with both Icelanders and Americans to really figure out where to shoot and how to shoot safely.” She gives special credit to her cinematographer, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, who was able to “intuit the life force of these abiotic landscapes in such a powerful way through his camera … to create a feeling of a glaciers life if we’re going to comprehend its death. So his cinematography really captured a feeling of movement inside the frozen world of the glacier.”
As her film states, although observers can’t detect a glaciers movement visually, it can be perceived through sound. “You can hear the groans and creaks and the water flowing through it,” Dosa explains. Working with a glacial sound advisor, the re-recording mixer was able “to create this visceral sense that this glacier is alive, it is moving, but when that movement stops, that’s defined as dead ice, and that’s what happens to Okjökull in the film.”
Dosa has often dramatized the parallels between human relationships and our connection to the natural world, as she did with her Oscar-nominated documentary Fire of Love, which centered on a pair of scientists who fell in love over a shared passion for volcanos. “For me as a filmmaker, I think I’m endlessly inspired and awed by our ‘more-than-human-nature,'” a term she uses because “I think of humans as part of nature. There’s often the feeling that humans are outside of nature … that dichotomy I think is actually at the root of tremendous violence for hundreds of years.”
“For me, there’s a political and ethical dimension to the films I’m really interested in,” she continues, “and then as someone who works in the visual medium of sound and image, I feel like a glacier is nearly celestial in its beauty, its allure, its grandiosity that escapes human knowledge.”
Dosa’s next project will continue to explore the interaction between humans and natural phenomena. She is in the early stages of co-directing a film about earthquakes in Mexico City, which asks, “When the earth ruptures, how too do our ideas of memory and history also rupture? What comes from the earth in these moments when the earth shakes?”
Time and Water is now in theaters. The film will air on National Geographic and stream on Disney+ later this year.
