Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love told such a unique story, so I was keen to discover this new feature-length documentary from the filmmaker, which moves us to an alternative tale of passionate explorers, this time expanding the story with the history of a generational family, while also counterbalancing it with a deeper explore into glaciers of Iceland via archival footage. This is all tied together by a voiceover (taken from his own book of the same name) from Icelandic poet and author, Andri Snær Magnason, who is intending to create a cinematic time capsule to freeze the past for future generations.

“To my loved ones…”

Titled Time And Water, Sara Dosa’s film is created with an amalgamation of Magnason’s archival family movies, including his grandparents’ photographs and films, as well as a delve into traditional Icelandic songs and folktales, and also the suggestion of secret forests hidden beneath the thick ice. Initially, it feels like the overall aim of the documentary may well be to not only educate those beyond the ‘now’ but to also act as a factual representation of the changing world, and especially Iceland’s highly respected and environmentally vital, glaciers. We do learn of their scale and nature, with an estimated 269 across the country, which range in size from smaller lake-sized ones all the way to the mighty Vatnajökull, which is roughly the size of Cyprus (to offer a rudimentary visualisation) and it even covers active volcanoes.

What Time And Water does well is make sure you know the importance of glaciers in a Global sense. They’re slow-moving bodies of ice, and some can be thousands of years old, but in the last 26 years, there’s scientific proof they’ve been losing their mass faster than ever recorded. The film even spends time with a story around a funeral for one, named Okjökull, that was declared dead in 2014. While, for some, a physical funeral may sound bizarre or theatrical, it’s clear that through Andri Snær Magnason’s voiceover that it’s no different from losing a loved one for the country, and he’s got a fair point given their importance in the nature of our Earth.

Alongside the stories and archive footage, the visuals offers us high definition macro-like cinematography of ice, from its vast caverns and crevasses, to water dripping from it as it hears. There’s beautiful blue hues in focus, like an other-worldly ice planet, all living inside the curves and peaks of a vast country with so much natural history. Beside this is Andri’s tale which aims to connect his private story with the land around him, and his family history is fascinating. From direct relations who’ve been involved in the unintentional capturing of Iceland through the decades – and how it has changed – this is notably a personal tale which can be touching. However, given how it sells itself, I was often hoping that the work done from the past would link more directly to now, and I didn’t think that was as clear, nor did I think it educated as well as it might have. While they linger around the thoughts of ‘what we can do now?’, it’s merely setup as a mutual understanding, rather than a call to act.

As a full picture, Time And Water offers a unique reality of perceiving awe-inspiring glaciers that are imperative to the future of the globe in their natural habitat, it’s an important insight, yet it feels like we’re missing an opportunity to punch that reality into the main frame and, instead, we’re often falling off that unsteady, unpredictable and compelling ground into slightly self-indulgent musings on Andri’s family history, which is understandable, but also frustrating because while we’re given facts, the wider discussion isn’t fully realised.

One of the most beautifully, bittersweet moments is when a camera follows a slice of glacier drifting off into the sea alone, before witnessing it slowly breaking down and dissolving into the ocean. The significance of this cannot be understated, and while the world may follow a certain pattern of change through millennia, right here and now climate change is shifting everything far too quickly, and Time And Water does just enough to remind us. If the documentary intention is to shock, then it slips off the ice, but what remains beneath is still a profoundly reflective contemplation on the collapse of a vital human necessity, warning us that it’ll drift off silently into the deep before we’ve reacted quickly enough to save it.

Time And Water is in UK cinemas from 12 June, find your closest screening here: https://timeandwater.squarespace.com/