Time and Water      Director: Sara DosaCert: NoneGenre: DocumentaryStarring: Andri Snaer MagnasonRunning Time: 1 hr 33 minsSara Dosa’s Time and Water begins with a love story. Jón and Hulda, who were some of the first explorers of Iceland’s glaciers, fell in love and honeymooned on one of these vast bodies of ice. Their footage, dating from the 1950s, captures the unique thrum of the objects of their obsession, a sound that distinguishes the glaciers from dead hunks of ice.The Oscar-nominated director behind Fire of Love, a brilliant portrait of the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, finds her stride with another extreme horizon. Time and Water is an arresting documentary about Iceland’s disappearing glaciers that avoids the doomy and familiar traps of environmental film-making. Eschewing statistics or didactic argument, Dosa crafts a reflective meditation on memory and on national and generational inheritance, grasping the retreat of ice as both subject and metaphor.The film finds a hero in Andri Snær Magnason, grandson of Jón and Hulda, whose family archive of photos, home movies and romances provides a human scale to a crisis measured in centuries. Using recorded testimonies from his long-married grandparents, Magnason chronicles generations of engagement with Iceland’s glaciers, landscapes once regarded as permanent features of national life. Their gradual disappearance transforms these personal records into evidence of profound environmental change. The narrator, who is a poet and a former employee at the National Archives of Iceland, recalls a farmer’s tale about a forest glimpsed in a glacier. This story aligns with accounts from the earliest Icelandic visitors, who noted 14th-century woodlands that have since disappeared from the black landscape.The documentary repeatedly returns to the idea of glaciers as archives: repositories of geological memory now threatened by a warming climate. Magnason’s reflections similarly frame environmental collapse as the end of a collective experience.Dosa, following her subject’s lead, juxtaposes archival material with contemporary images of shrinking ice fields, creating a visual dialogue between past abundance and present fragility. Vast aerial shots reveal glaciers receding. Locals, including Magnason, hold a requiem for the Okjökull glacier, a relative newcomer at 150 years old, which has disappeared. Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.In cinemas from Friday, June 12th