Time and Water

Nature films generally do a great job of capturing the intrinsic beauty of our world and in explaining its function and attributes. They’re often gorgeous to look at and quite educational. However, these documentaries sometimes tend to be a little on the “clinical” side, keeping viewers at something of an emotionally arm’s-length distance. But, every so often, a release comes along that pleasantly surprises audiences, serving up nature’s bounty with an eloquent, poetic touch. Such is the case with the latest documentary from writer-director Sara Dosa, an offering that provides intriguing parallels between the world of nature and the world of man, delivered from a highly personal perspective and imparting a crucial cautionary tale for both realms. “Time and Water” presents a stunning and insightful cinematic essay about Iceland, specifically the special bond between its people and its lan…

Using some family movies and some more up-to-date footage of the often moon-like scenery of modern day Iceland, this documentary proves really quite effective at illustrating the ongoing and profound effects of global warming. Rather than just bombarding us with statistics and scare-mongering facts, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason introduces us to his now deceased grandparents and by using the chronology of their and his own lives, he is able to show us the glaciers they skied on in their youth - the 1950s, that have now become little more than heaps of rock and scree. Indeed, if you hadn't seen the films or photographs in their archive then you might never have known there had been a glacier there in the first place. It's this very visual contemporaneousness that proves the point he is trying to make in real-time terms. There is a line in his commentary that points out that events …