Sara Dosa Brings Time and Water to Big Screens

Sara Dosa’s – After the Sundance success of “Fire of Love,” documentarian Sara Dosa reunites with Icelandic writer/activist Andri Snær Magnason for “Time and Water,” a glacier-centered film drawn from family archives. The NatGeo documentary opens at NYC’s Angelika Film Cent

The first images in “Time and Water” arrive as blue mysteries on ice—objects you can’t immediately place—while Andri Snær Magnason’s voice turns toward someone in the future. It’s the kind of opening that makes you lean in. because it’s not asking you to simply watch glaciers. It’s asking you to imagine what it means to lose them.

Sara Dosa’s latest documentary has now found a wider audience after premiering at Sundance earlier this year. National Geographic Documentary Films will open the film at NYC’s Angelika Film Center on Friday, May 29, before it lands at LA’s Laemmle Royal on Friday, June 5.

For Dosa, the return feels both inevitable and overdue. After “Fire of Love”—her Sundance 2022 breakthrough about a love triangle between a French scientist couple and volcanoes. later scooped up by NatGeo and taken to an Oscar nomination—Dosa returned to a project that had been back-burnered during the pandemic. She had consulted with Magnason on the Icelandic film “The Seer and the Unseen” (2019). and once the world opened back up. she reconnected with him.

Zooming in to talk about their working relationship. Dosa said Magnason had already been impossible to ignore in Iceland: he was part of a protest movement to protect a lava field threatened by what she called a “needless. absurd road construction project.” “Everybody told me. ‘You have to meet Andri. ’” Dosa said. She described him as “one of the big leaders of environmentalism in Iceland. ” adding that he writes poetry and science fiction as well as environmental journalism. and that he also ran for president in Iceland.

“Time and Water” shifts the focus from volcanoes to glaciers, and from Magnason’s public activism to a more intimate landscape: “His perspective is cosmic,” Dosa said, describing how he connects “all these connections between things” in a way that makes them feel “emotional and human all at once.”

The creative spark between Dosa and Magnason sharpened around a single piece of writing—so direct it reset the way Dosa understood the film’s emotional core. She said Magnason wrote an article about “the funeral for Iceland’s first dead glacier. ” titled “How do you say goodbye to a glacier?” Dosa called it “a profound concept and a new language for our new times. ” and she connected it to the climate crisis and to COVID. saying many people are living through “unparalleled loss” but “don’t have languages or rituals” for it.

That question—how to mourn what can’t be replaced—became the lens of the film. Dosa said she wanted to put “in kinship a story of a glacier and a story of a family through a cinematic lens.”

The glacier story didn’t come from scratch. After seeing “Fire of Love,” Magnason told Dosa about the archive of his grandparents, who photographed Iceland’s glaciers. Dosa said the imagery offered a rare view of that “time. when it was before people knew glaciers were disappearing.” She pointed to “the gaze of their camera” and the “boundlessness” it carries—“this endless expanse.”.

In summer 2023, Dosa and her producers Shane Boris and Elijah Stevens flew to Iceland to meet with Snær Magnason and review his archives. Dosa said that as soon as they saw the footage, they were “in,” and they managed to show NatGeo some footage to persuade the distributor to back the project.

Once the film was taking shape, Dosa described the family archive as more than a record of ice. “The rich family video archive was not just about glaciers, but also about humans,” she said. She traced a “clear through line” for memory—“human memory. as well as planetary memory”—and said those memories are “encased in glaciers” in a way that felt “exciting” to them as filmmakers. For her, love is the connecting thread: “And the through line is love.”.

As with “Fire of Love. ” the film’s subjects are drawn to the extremes of nature. and Magnason narrates the story. Miranda July provided narration for “Fire of Love.” Dosa said Magnason shares a writing credit with her and with editors Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput as they built what she described as “constantly changing iterations of the jigsaw puzzle of footage and narration.”.

They used Magnason’s 2019 book “On Time and Water” as a guide. but Dosa was clear about the relationship between the book and the film. “It’s a companion to the book. ” she said. adding. “the film is not an adaptation of the book.” Dosa explained how the work moved in cycles: cuts were sent to him. he gave notes. and they also sent scripts for him to record narration regularly. “We always had cycles of new stuff going to him. and then he would email it back to us. and then we would try to incorporate his voice into the cut.”.

Filming glaciers also meant dealing with the most changeable kind of environment. Dosa said the team had glacial guides who knew “when to pull them out for weather,” and she described them as “fluent in glacier.” She added that she and her crew “all felt very safe with them.”

Behind the camera. the film’s look was built by director of photography Pablo Alvarez Mesa. whom Dosa described as skilled at photographing “systems of water. fog. waterfalls. streams. and ice” on both digital formats and on 16mm. Dosa said the team shot on a Bolex and an Ari—using Bolex to “dialog with the archival material and be a bridge between times.” Even in conditions where they were “battered by the wind and the snow. ” she said Alvarez Mesa found ways to capture the grandiosity and the “magic of the ice.”.

The future-facing tone stays with you. At the beginning of the film. Dosa said Magnason is welcoming “the future recipients of our film to this time capsule that he’s created.” Her hope for that moment is direct: that viewers will be “intrigued” by a “mysterious landscape” they may perceive as ice. then connect to Magnason’s message that they “will never meet because we live in different times. ” and that he cannot send a glacier—but “at least I can send you this.”.

By the end, Magnason’s narration turns sharper and stranger. Dosa quoted him wondering, “I wonder what would happen in 200 years to my country, knowing there possibly won’t be glaciers? Would saying the name Iceland be summoning a ghost?”

Dosa’s response to that idea was immediate and raw. “It’s up to us; what we do now makes a difference if there will be ice in Iceland,” she said, choking back tears as she spoke about “grappling with the distance between now and the speculative future.”

She also acknowledged how hard the work of making grief-based art becomes when the world is already grieving. Dosa said we face the climate crisis “unevenly. depending on our circumstances. ” but that “there’s profound loss all around us. ” and that it has been “challenging to work on a film about grief when we’re all experiencing grief.”.

Her next steps reflect that same pull toward geologic time and human memory. Dosa said she has a few shorts she’s producing. as well as “Daughters of the Forest. ” from Mexican director Otilia Portillo Padua. which premiered at SXSW. She added that she and her team are in the early stages of development on a project about cyclical earthquakes in Mexico City.

Dosa pointed to a troubling timeline: “On September 19. three different years. there have been major earthquakes. which is baffling.” She said the project will explore the legacies of colonial violence in Mexico alongside contemporary life—what it means “to live in a place where the earth could split open. ” and what comes forth “from those ruptures.”.

For now. though. “Time and Water” is set to reach new audiences in the same way Dosa’s other work has—by turning big. terrifying loss into something personal enough to sit with. And on screens starting May 29 in New York and June 5 in Los Angeles. that question she keeps returning to will follow viewers long after the credits: how do you say goodbye—when the thing you’re losing has no language of its own?.

Sara Dosa Time and Water Andri Snær Magnason National Geographic Documentary Films Sundance 2026 Fire of Love Angelika Film Center Laemmle Royal glaciers Iceland documentary Miranda July Pablo Alvarez Mesa