“A documentary about the relationship between macro history and personal time.”

Much like Andri Snær Magnason, whose life and work animates Sara Dosa’s beautiful yet deeply melancholic Time and Water, I would like to begin this review with a time capsule of my own, dedicating everything that follows to my loved ones. May words and images complement one another in the difficult task of putting “one thousand years in words, a thousand words which carve me to death,” as the song “Heima” by the Icelandic group Sigur Rós expresses.

Unlike Magnason’s, the history of my life begins in the Global South, in 1988. Curiously enough, had he not become a father, Magnason might have traveled to the Amazon to conduct research with a relative, and his account of Iceland’s melting glaciers might have also encompassed the slow death of the world’s largest tropical forest. I was born, then, alongside a new iteration of the Brazilian Republic, as the country emerged from more than two decades of a brutal military dictatorship. That same year, Brazil’s current Constitution was approved, enabling the nation to hold its first presidential election by popular vote. Yet above all, 1988 marked the centenary of the abolition of slavery. The country with the largest Black diaspora outside Africa is also the one whose history remains indelibly scarred by being the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to formally abolish slavery.

Returning to my personal timeline: as the country endured repeated upheavals, a medical malpractice during my birth meant that my grandmother helped raise me while my mother recovered. In the years that followed, I attended a military school, came out to my parents while still a teenager in a country only beginning to take tentative steps toward queer rights, and became the first in my family to go to college. A few years later, in 2022, as I was conducting my PhD research, the specter of dictatorship nearly resurfaced, haunting the country under the disgraced and now incarcerated former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro, in the wake of his failed coup attempt.

Personal and historical time entangle with one another, much like my grandmother’s memories in the final year of her life. Not long before she died, she no longer recognized the face of the man she had helped raise. She became a completely different woman from the one I still carry with me, preserved in memory, and in every photograph and home video kept as a souvenir of who she once was.

In a way, Time and Water becomes a documentary about the relationship between macro history and personal time. More specifically, about Magnason himself, born in Iceland in 1973, his family of glacier researchers, and their intimate bond with the land and the ice. From this perspective, the film reveals a striking paradox: while his grandparents were among the first to explore some of Iceland’s glaciers, Magnason has become one of the first to witness their death, an event that not long ago was considered impossible.

Despair may seem like the only appropriate response. Yet, Time and Water does not ask us to resolve that feeling, but to recognize it. As Magnason repeatedly laments, “I thought I had more time,” a sentence that reverberates throughout Dosa’s film, applying equally to the melting ice and to the passing of the eldest members of his family. Is this not the most common of human errors, to assume there will always be more time, even as we live in constant contradiction of that belief?

Here lies the film’s greatest strength. By constantly alternating between Iceland’s climate catastrophe, which is also our own, and Magnason’s most intimate moments, the film avoids a frantic rhythm that would undermine the story it is truly telling: time passes, and it drags everything with it. How, then, do we think about what was unthinkable not so long ago? Why is it so difficult to reframe our perspective and accept that we may already be past the point of no return?

In this sense, Time and Water engages these questions by deliberately narrowing the scope of its narrative. Aside from a brief scene in which a journalist tells Magnason that one of his books may be among the most political releases of the year, the film avoids explicit discussion of Icelandic politics or Europe’s role in the climate crisis. Instead, we watch Magnason write a eulogy for the death of a glacier, and its cause being clinically, and artistically, attributed to extreme heat, or a summer that arrived and never left. At this moment, art presents itself as a way to confront the absurdity and violence of such a reality.

However, far from “depoliticizing” an inherently political subject, this approach reframes a global catastrophe through the film’s meditation on the passage of time. In other words, humanity’s most astonishing achievement may also be the one that ensures its demise: the compression of geological time, once measured in millennia, into the span of a single human life. Something as vast as Iceland’s glaciers is now disappearing within our own life expectancy, rendering even the apocalypse part of our everyday experience.

Here, I am reminded of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, in which he writes: “We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms.”

In the end, Time and Water forces us to confront both the magnitude of the disaster and the difficulty of fully comprehending what is unfolding, not climate change itself, but the speed at which it is occurring, how unprepared we are for truly unprecedented times, and how precarious our ways of preserving the memory of the past have become. An idea that is powerfully translated to the screen through the very damage time inflicts on Magnason’s tapes, the same recordings that once served as his way of keeping the past alive.