- Title: Time and Water
- IMDb: link
“I struggle with the death of one glacier, and here is the news they all will be gone.”
Narrated by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, Time and Water is the writer’s musing on both his grandparents and the region’s gigantic glaciers, both of which have begun to disappear. Given his grandparents love of the gigantic sheets of ice, which Magnason shares through stories, video, and photographs taken over the years, he explores the intricate, and profound, nature of glaciers which are quickly disappearing from the world.
Gigantic sheets of ice which take hundreds or thousands of years to form are disappearing at an alarming rate drastically changing Iceland and the ways in which people and animals interact with their surroundings. It’s a profoundly personal account of loss to explain the effects of climate change. Linking the glaciers to his aging grandparents not only helps explain the importance of the ice to the family but also the cruel truth of time.
Part nature documentary and part family biography, Time and Water is a melancholy look back at a world that is disappearing as Magnason even muses if one day the country’s name will have lost all meaning other than a ghostly memory by a scant few. The writing of his grandfather’s obituary, and then the government asking him to craft one for the death of a glacier, challenge to poet to explore the scale of loss and a culture shift so profound he turns to generational memory, and even myths and legends, for context and understanding as the current world holds no answers and scant comfort.
