{"id":253338,"date":"2026-01-27T01:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T01:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/253338\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T01:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T01:21:09","slug":"documentarian-sara-dosa-returns-to-sundance-with-time-and-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/253338\/","title":{"rendered":"Documentarian Sara Dosa Returns to Sundance with ‘Time and Water’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sara Dosa <\/a>has done it again. After \u201cFire of Love<\/a>,\u201d about a love triangle between a French scientist couple and volcanoes, wowed Sundance 2022 and was scooped up by NatGeo, which took it to an Oscar nomination, Dosa went back to another project that had been back-burnered during the pandemic. She had consulted with scientist\/poet\/eco-activist Andri Sn\u00e6r Magnason on the Icelandic film<\/a> \u201cThe Seer and the Unseen\u201d (2019), and now for her latest film \u201cTime and Water<\/a>\u201d premiering at Sundance 2026, she reconnected with him after the world opened up again.<\/p>\n

Sn\u00e6r Magnason was part of a protest movement to protect a lava field that was threatened by a \u201cneedless, absurd road construction project,\u201d said Dosa on Zoom. \u201cEverybody told me, \u2018you have to meet Andri.\u2019 He\u2019s one of the big leaders of environmentalism in Iceland. He writes poetry and science fiction as well as environmental journalism. He also ran for president in Iceland.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HOUSE<\/a> \"'Once<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cTime and Water\u201d focuses more on Sn\u00e6r Magnason\u2019s intimate relationships in a family obsessed not with volcanoes, but glaciers. \u201cHis perspective is cosmic,\u201d said Dosa. \u201cHe\u2019s able to draw all these connections between things and somehow make them feel emotional and human all at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was when he wrote about the funeral for Iceland\u2019s first dead glacier that Dosa renewed their connection. \u201cThe article was entitled, \u2018How do you say goodbye to a glacier?’\u201d said Dosa. \u201cThat hit me as such a profound concept and a new language for our new times. How do we say goodbye to these things all around us that so many of us are grappling with, the climate crisis, or COVID? There\u2019s so many examples of unparalleled loss that people are experiencing, and we don\u2019t have languages or rituals to do that. I thought, \u2018How important and meaningful and also human it could be to try to put in kinship a story of a glacier and a story of a family through a cinematic lens.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SaraSara Dosa<\/a>, director of \u2018Time and Water,\u2019 an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. | photo by Leon BennettLeon Bennett<\/p>\n

After Sn\u00e6r Magnason saw \u201cFire of Love,\u201d he told Dosa about the archive of his grandparents, who photographed Iceland\u2019s glaciers. \u201cAndre\u2019s grandparents had gorgeous imagery of the glaciers that also captured this time, when it was before people knew glaciers were disappearing. There\u2019s something with the gaze of their camera where you feel this boundlessness, this endless expanse.\u201d<\/p>\n

In summer 2023, Dosa and her producers Shane Boris and Elijah Stevens flew to Iceland to meet with Sn\u00e6r Magnason and look through his archives. 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.<\/p>\n

The rich family video archive \u201cwas not just about glaciers, but also about humans,\u201d said Dosa. \u201cThere\u2019s such a clear through line there to talk about human memory, as well as planetary memory, encased in glaciers in a way that felt exciting to us as filmmakers. And the through line is love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similar to \u201cFire of Love,\u201d the subjects of \u201cTime and Water\u201d are in love with the extremes of nature. And narrator Sn\u00e6r Magnason carries the story of the film, as did Miranda July for \u201cFire of Love.\u201d He shares a writing credit with Dosa and her editors Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput as they figured out constantly changing iterations of the jigsaw puzzle of footage and narration.<\/p>\n

\"Time\u2018Time and Water\u2019<\/p>\n

They used Sn\u00e6r Magnason\u2019s 2019 book \u201cOn Time and Water\u201d as a guide. \u201cBut the film is not an adaptation of the book,\u201d said Dosa. \u201cIt\u2019s a companion to the book. But we did have language that we could pull from here and there. We would send him cuts quite frequently, and so he would give notes on cuts. And we would send him scripts to record the narration all the time. And so 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Shooting on glaciers is a risky business, but Dosa and her team had glacial guides who knew when to pull them out for weather. \u201cThey\u2019re fluent in Glacier,\u201d she said. \u201cSo we all felt very safe with them. We had an extraordinary Director of Photography named Pablo Alvarez Mesa, who is skilled at photographing systems of water, fog, waterfalls, streams, and ice on both digital formats as well as on 16mm. And so we were shooting on a Bolex and we were shooting on an Ari to capture both the grandiosity, the magic of the ice, as well as on the Bolex that was meant to dialog with the archival material and be a bridge between times. Pablo was able to do that in these precarious landscapes where we were just being battered by the wind and the snow.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the film we see mysterious blue objects that we can\u2019t identify, as Sn\u00e6r Magnason\u2019s voice addresses a person in the future, perhaps a descendant. \u201cHe\u2019s welcoming the future recipients of our film to this time capsule that he\u2019s created,\u201d said Dosa. \u201cAnd our hope is that you\u2019ll be intrigued by this mysterious landscape that you might perceive is ice, but you\u2019ll be connecting to this idea that he\u2019s saying, \u2018We\u2019ll never meet because we live in different times. I cannot send you a glacier, but at least I can send you this.’\u201d<\/p>\n

By the film\u2019s end, Sn\u00e6r Magnason says, \u201cI wonder what would happen in 200 years to my country, knowing there possibly won\u2019t be glaciers? Would saying the name Iceland be summoning a ghost?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s up to us; what we do now makes a difference if there will be ice in Iceland,\u201d said Dosa, choking back tears, \u201cgrappling with the distance between now and the speculative future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dosa knows that we are all faced with the ravages of the climate crisis, \u201cunevenly, depending on our circumstances,\u201d she said, \u201cbut there\u2019s profound loss all around us, and it\u2019s been challenging to work on a film about grief when we\u2019re all experiencing grief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next up: Dosa has a few shorts she\u2019s producing, as well as an unnamed project with Mexican director Otilia Portillo Padua set to premiere at South by Southwest. They\u2019re also in the early stages of development on a project about cyclical earthquakes in Mexico City. \u201cOn September 19, three different years, there have been major earthquakes, which is baffling,\u201d said Dosa. \u201cAgain, it deals with themes of geologic time and memory. This one will explore the legacies of colonial violence in Mexico as well, but also contemporary life and what it means to live in a place where the earth could split open, and what comes forth from those ruptures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTime and Water\u201d world premieres at Sundance on January 27 at 11:30 MT at the Library Center Theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sara Dosa has done it again. After \u201cFire of Love,\u201d about a love triangle between a French scientist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10779,156,592,593,594,409,111,139,69,2584,146757,146758],"class_list":{"0":"post-253338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-festivals","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-interviews","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-oscars","18":"tag-sara-dosa","19":"tag-time-and-water"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}