Sara Dosa Does It Again: ‘Fire of Love’ Filmmaker Returns to Sundance with ‘Time and Water,’ Another Science Love Story

After her Oscar-nominated documentary, Dosa is back with another compelling film set in Iceland about a family's obsession with glaciers.

Sara Dosa has done it again. After “Fire of Love,” about a love triangle between a French scientist couple and volcanoes, wowed Sundance 2022 and was scooped up by NatGeo, which took it to an Oscar nomination, Dosa went back to another project that had been back-burnered during the pandemic. She had consulted with writer/poet/eco-activist Andri Snær Magnason on the Icelandic film “The Seer and the Unseen” (2019), and now for her latest film “Time and Water” (NatGeo), premiering at Sundance 2026, she reconnected with him after the world opened up again.

Magnason was part of a protest movement to protect a lava field that was threatened by a “needless, absurd road construction project,” said Dosa on Zoom. “Everybody told me, ‘you have to meet Andri.’ He’s one of the big leaders of environmentalism in Iceland. He writes poetry and science fiction as well as environmental journalism. He also ran for president in Iceland.”

“Time and Water” focuses more on Magnason’s intimate relationships in a family obsessed not with volcanoes, but glaciers. “His perspective is cosmic,” said Dosa. “He’s able to draw all these connections between things and somehow make them feel emotional and human all at once.”

It was when he wrote about the funeral for Iceland’s first dead glacier that Dosa renewed their connection. “The article was entitled, ‘How do you say goodbye to a glacier?'” said Dosa. “That hit me as such a profound concept and a new language for our new times. How do we say goodbye to these things all around us that so many of us are grappling with, the climate crisis, or COVID? There’s so many examples of unparalleled loss that people are experiencing, and we don’t have languages or rituals to do that. I thought, ‘How important and meaningful and also human it could be to try to put in kinship a story of a glacier and a story of a family through a cinematic lens.'”

After Magnason saw “Fire of Love,” he told Dosa about the archive of his grandparents, who photographed Iceland’s glaciers. “Andre’s grandparents had gorgeous imagery of the glaciers that also captured this time, when it was before people knew glaciers were disappearing. There’s something with the gaze of their camera where you feel this boundlessness, this endless expanse.”

In summer 2023, Dosa and her producers Shane Boris and Elijah Stevens flew to Iceland to meet with Snær Magnason and look through his archives. As soon as they saw the footage, they were in, and they managed to show NatGeo some footage to persuade the distributor to back the project.

The rich family video archive “was not just about glaciers, but also about humans,” said Dosa. “There’s such a clear through line there to talk about human memory, as well as planetary memory, encased in glaciers in a way that felt exciting to us as filmmakers. And the through line is love.”

Similar to “Fire of Love,” the subjects of “Time and Water” are in love with the extremes of nature. And narrator Magnason carries the story of the film, as did Miranda July for “Fire of Love.” He shares a writing credit with Dosa and her editors Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput as they figured out constantly changing iterations of the jigsaw puzzle of footage and narration.

They used Magnason’s 2019 book “On Time and Water” as a guide. “But the film is not an adaptation of the book,” said Dosa. “It’s a companion to the book. But we did have language that we could pull from here and there. We would send him cuts quite frequently, and so he would give notes on cuts. And we would send him scripts to record the narration all the time. And so we always had cycles of new stuff going to him, and then he would email it back to us, and then we would try to incorporate his voice into the cut.”

Shooting on glaciers is a risky business, but Dosa and her team had glacial guides who knew when to pull them out for weather. “They’re fluent in Glacier,” she said. “So we all felt very safe with them. We had an extraordinary Director of Photography named Pablo Alvarez Mesa, who is skilled at photographing systems of water, fog, waterfalls, streams, and ice on both digital formats as well as on 16mm. And so we were shooting on a Bolex and we were shooting on an Ari to capture both the grandiosity, the magic of the ice, as well as on the Bolex that was meant to dialog with the archival material and be a bridge between times. Pablo was able to do that in these precarious landscapes where we were just being battered by the wind and the snow.”

At the beginning of the film we see mysterious blue objects that we can’t identify, as Magnason’s voice addresses a person in the future, perhaps a descendant. “He’s welcoming the future recipients of our film to this time capsule that he’s created,” said Dosa. “And our hope is that you’ll be intrigued by this mysterious landscape that you might perceive is ice, but you’ll be connecting to this idea that he’s saying, ‘We’ll never meet because we live in different times. I cannot send you a glacier, but at least I can send you this.'”

By the film’s end, Magnason says, “I wonder what would happen in 200 years to my country, knowing there possibly won’t be glaciers? Would saying the name Iceland be summoning a ghost?”

“It’s up to us; what we do now makes a difference if there will be ice in Iceland,” said Dosa, choking back tears, “grappling with the distance between now and the speculative future.”

Dosa knows that we are all faced with the ravages of the climate crisis, “unevenly, depending on our circumstances,” she said, “but there’s profound loss all around us, and it’s been challenging to work on a film about grief when we’re all experiencing grief.”

Next up: Dosa has a few shorts she’s producing, as well as “Daughters of the Forest,” from Mexican director Otilia Portillo Padua, set to premiere at South by Southwest. They’re also in the early stages of development on a project about cyclical earthquakes in Mexico City. “On September 19, three different years, there have been major earthquakes, which is baffling,” said Dosa. “Again, it deals with themes of geologic time and memory. This one will explore the legacies of colonial violence in Mexico as well, but also contemporary life and what it means to live in a place where the earth could split open, and what comes forth from those ruptures.”

“Time and Water” world premieres at Sundance on January 27 at 11:30 MT at the Library Center Theatre.