SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Director Sara Dosa curates a cinematic time capsule for Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason in her documentary Time and Water. Confronted with rapidly melting glaciers and the mortality of his beloved grandparents, Magnason collects images, footage, and historical narratives to preserve the story of his family and the Iceland he knows. The film is also a love letter and a memorial tribute to a glacier named Okjökull, which is the first glacier to be declared destroyed by climate change. When a glacier stops moving, it is considered dead. It will melt in place. Motion is life for these formations.
From expeditions onto gigantic glaciers in tracked vehicles decades ago to the comforts of old age, Magnason shows us the memories he’s assembled, imagining that people in some future time will see his film and know the places and people dear to him. He shows us the life and death of his grandfather, Andri, drawing parallels between the sharp pain of that loss and the rapidly changing environment. He captures the raw beauty of Iceland on film, where snowstorms rage, and the landscape is made of volcanic waves frozen in old lava, and where glacial ice caves are stunning natural sculptures, moving at a pace too slow for human perception. Iceland has always been a place of primordial elements, close to the bones of the Earth and reminiscent of the beginnings of our planet.
A still from Time and Water by Sara Dosa, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Archival Materials Courtesy of Andri Snær Magnason.
“… Magnason collects images, footage, historical narratives into a time capsule …”
Icelandic culture is the same. Vikings arrived on the shores of this forbidding land between 870 and 930 AD with the intent of setting up farming centers, an ambitious goal for a place seemingly made of ice and rock. From these rough beginnings, Icelandic culture has developed and endured for over 2000 years, tracing ancestral lines back the whole way. There is a statue of Leif Erikson displayed prominently in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital. It stands before the contemporary Hallgrim’s Lutheran church, connecting two millennia of Icelandic culture in one place.
Magnason walks us through old slides from his family, including his grandfather in his younger days, adventuring out on the glaciers. They took many photos out on the ice, believing that, like glaciers, they were documenting the passage of time. Ice to fire, glaciers to volcanoes, the still and moving pictures are awe-inspiring.
Even the toughest people wouldn’t live long in an environment as dynamic as Iceland without a deep respect for the forces of nature, and the Icelanders have that reverence and the knowledge to thrive here. Glaciologists in the film report that climate change is progressing at an accelerating rate, such that all the glaciers in Iceland, thousands of years old, will have melted within the next 200 years.
Time and Water is a meditative elegy for a disappearing land that has forged the culture of Iceland for thousands of years. Icelanders are, and will remain, as stoic and resilient as their Viking ancestors. Dosa and Magnason’s film will stand as a testament to a time when there was ice in Iceland.
Time and Water screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival
"…a cinematic time capsule..."
