On Time and Water has become the inspiration for a feature length documentary film by National Geographic, directed by Sara Dosa. Opening at the Sundance Film Festival the 27th of January 2026.
Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.
How do you say goodbye to what you never thought you could lose? That’s the question Magnason grapples with in Sara Dosa’s ambitious new project following her 2022 Sundance Film Festival breakout Fire of Love. Tasked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change, Magnason reflects on how glaciers create an archive of deep time within their ice over millions of years. Likening this idea of the depth of time to intergenerational memory, he sets out to pass along the stories of his grandparents for future generations, before they too vanish. Drawing from an evocative mix of photographs, home movies, myths, songs, and folk tales, Time and Water is at once an elegy for what we’ve lost and an attempt at cinematic time travel to retain it. — BT
DIRECTOR
Sara Dosa
PRODUCERS
Shane Boris
Elijah Stevens
Jameka Autry
Sara Dosa
SCREENWRITERS
Sara Dosa
Jocelyne Chaput
Erin Casper
Andri Snær Magnason
CO-PRODUCERS
Andri Snær Magnason
Heather Millard
ADDITIONAL PRODUCER
Halldóra Þorláksdóttir
ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS
Natalia Fuentes
Freyja Kristinsdóttir
NARRATED BY
Andri Snær Magnason
EDITOR
Erin Casper
Jocelyne Chaput
Mark Harrison
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Pablo Alvarez-Mesa
ANIMATOR
Lucy Munger
COMPOSER
Dan Deacon
COMPANY
National Geographic Documentary Films
CONTACT
Nadia Ahmadein
Nadia.Ahmadein@natgeo.com
