Movie review
Sara Dosa’s transcendent “Time and Water” confronts the most pressing existential questions of our time. It’s visually stunning, unshakably sad and very human. Eschewing documentary convention in delicate yet decisive fashion, it offers a profoundly personal and mournful meditation on all we’re losing in the world.
Like she did in her previous documentary — the fantastic “Fire of Love” — Dosa uses the breathtaking wonders of the natural world as a jumping-off point to explore the lives of people. In “Time and Water,” her subject is Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, who is grappling with the death of a glacier and the mortality of his own family members. His grief over losing his loved ones is inextricable from his grief over the destruction we are wreaking on the climate and ourselves. As we hear him say via recurring narration that plays over both archival footage and home videos he recorded, “How do you say goodbye to a glacier?”
For Dosa, it’s with this film; for her subject, it’s with the poetry he writes. However, both know this is insufficient. For all the beauty he captures with his writing or she with her film, there remains a rapidly accelerating tragedy that art alone cannot stop. But it can remind us what is most important, as Dosa shows us in every precise cut that draws us closer to both the natural world and the people living in it. It can help us remember the vibrant life that remains worth fighting for and how, in the face of the end of all things, we can still pull back from the brink.
“Time and Water” is thus a time capsule, built around questions of whether such time capsules are to last or if they are just our best attempt to shout across the void of time into the future. Whatever the answer is, 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.
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