Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason is commissioned to write a text for a plaque commemorating Ok, a glacier that died as a result of climate change. But what do you write for such an occasion?
Iceland’s glaciers are melting at an alarming rate; Ok was the smallest of them. Andri feels a deep connection to Icelandic nature, passed down through generations. His grandparents were among the first researchers to climb Iceland’s Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier.
Director Sara Dosa, whose film Fire of Love portrayed a French volcanologist couple, combines family history with Icelandic myths and sagas, a sense of awe at the natural world, and above all a poetic reflection on memory in Time and Water. As his grandfather develops dementia, Andri realizes that a glacier, like photography, embodies the passage of time. The ice is the memory of the Earth. The film, in turn, preserves for future generations just how deeply humanity and nature are intertwined.
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