Critic Reviews

A nature doc mixed with autobiography, “Time and Water” is a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.

Time and Water often feels like a celebration, a reminder of what’s right in front of us. Whether it be glaciers or grandmas or flowers or children, there is love somewhere nearby. In lesser hands, this all may play a bit cloying. Luckily, Dosa is deft in her ability.

Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

Time and Water is very much a project trying to capture memory, time, and history, even as it melts before your eyes.

Dosa’s film shouts loud and true, giving it a strong chance at enduring — even as it remains painfully aware there is no guarantee anything, no matter how much we love it, lasts forever.

In telling this one family’s story and examining their connection to the land they were born into, Dosa makes an affecting documentary about a looming danger that many are ignoring.

By reframing climate change as a crisis of memory, Dosa achieves what many climate documentaries struggle to accomplish. This is not a eulogy for a lost world, but a reminder of our responsibility to remember it.

Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.

Dosa’s film—which she wrote alongside Magnason, Jocelyne Chaput, and Erin Casper—sometimes strains a bit too visibly to connect this theme, becoming so enraptured with the encapsulating power of ice that the film protests too much about its own profundity.

Utilizing Magnason’s voluminous supply of home movies and supplementing it with cinematographer Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s spectacular footage of Icelandic landscapes, Dosa portrays the passing of a way of life that hints at an uncertain planetary future.