Time and Water: Iceland’s vanishing glaciers haunt this moving climate essay

When Andri Snær Magnason’s children were small, he used to tell them a story about how their home, Iceland, came to be. “First there was a void, then fire met the ice. In the chaos rose a cow, made from frost and snow, and from her body came glaciers that carved mountains and valleys. From her udders ran rivers that nourished the world. Her ice made a home… and ice became a home for all of us.”

This Norse creation myth, recounted by Magnason in voiceover in Time and Water, indicates the centrality of glaciers to Icelandic identity. But as Magnason tells us repeatedly throughout this painful, poignant essay film, the glaciers that sustain the country are at risk of disappearing. In a few decades, the glaciers themselves may feel as distant and fanciful as that mythical frozen cow.

Time and Water is an unusual piece of work, deeply personal in some senses, highly universal in others. Directed by US filmmaker Sara Dosa and inspired by a memoir written by Magnason, an Icelandic poet and author, the film feels very much like an equal collaboration. Like Dosa’s previous documentary, the Oscar-nominated Fire of Love (2022), Time and Water weaves together archive (here largely sourced from Magnason’s family’s collection) and newly shot footage, digital and 16mm, of Iceland’s spectacular but rapidly changing landscape. This web of footage is connected by Magnason’s first-person voiceover, which braids together family history, mythology and climate science to tell a meandering but mesmeric tale of dying glaciers, climate meltdown and intergenerational communication.

Delivered in lilting, lightly accented English (complemented by a lovely, shimmering soundtrack by electronic musician Dan Deacon), Magnason’s essay is framed as a time capsule broadcast into the future to descendants who might be living in an unrecognisably altered world. Through this transmission, Magnason says, he hopes to create “a portal, to a time when glaciers are still alive, held open”.

There’s no shortage of recent documentary drawing on personal archive, and sometimes these films can feel indulgent or solipsistic. Time and Water, however, largely manages to avoid insularity, partly through its wider environmental message, and partly thanks to the particularly fascinating, and relevant, nature of Magnason’s family history. His grandparents Hulda and Árni were glaciologists who spent their honeymoon on an expedition to Iceland’s largest glacier (“We were never cold,” Hulda chuckles, “we were newlyweds!”). Much of the historical glacier footage featured in the film was taken by the pair on research trips. As Árni ages and begins to lose his memory, Magnason finds a poignant connection between his grandfather’s fading recollections, their shared obsession with photography, and the deep time captured within the glaciers.

While this family aspect is moving, the part of Dosa and Magnason’s film that really takes flight is its enlightening, often revelatory discussion of the quasimagical qualities of the glacier itself. Across almost science-fictional images of indigo-tinted ice-caverns, we learn that blue is the colour of aged ice (“The deeper the blue, the deeper the time”). Grandmother Hulda tells us about the indescribable but exhilarating smell of a glacier in the spring. Magnason explains that for a glacier to be considered living, it must always be moving, emitting creaks and squeaks as it invisibly shifts under the weight of snow and ice it holds. It is when the glacier falls silent, no longer large enough to sustain this endless counterbalance, that it is considered dead. “I often think about the unsettling quiet of a glacier’s death,” Magnason tells us, in a characteristically piercing phrase: “It’s like a summertime which just came and stayed.”

That chilling image, of an eerily quiet, unnaturally endless summer, might be something we have to get used to. In one sobering news clip included here, a scientist says that Iceland’s glaciers could be completely gone within 200 years. Thousands of years of history are now melting within the span of a single human lifetime, each lost ice block carrying with it a chunk of deep time. While in some ways Time and Water might appear to be a distinctively Icelandic story, rooted in the country’s landscape and folklore, Dosa and Magnason leave us in no doubt that this is a global problem; the same melting is happening in Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas, with catastrophic implications for our global ecosystems. A shot of ice drifting into the sea and melting into the waves arrives, like so many beautifully chosen images in this film, as a disquieting metaphor.

► Time and Water is in UK cinemas 12 June.