Review: The death throes of glaciers make for an unusually personal doc in 'Time and Water'

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Glaciers aren’t stationary.Immense and imposing, formed through the downward trajectory of water from mountains as it collects and freezes, they have always moved.

Now, however, they’re leaving.The demise of glaciers is a fact inherent in all the bad news about the effects of climate change on what once seemed permanent.

But for Icelanders, whose connection to glaciers is ancient and mythic, our human epoch has become an extended hospice for the landscape of their lives.Somehow, though, Sara Dosa’s documentary on this matter, “Time and Water,” avoids playing like a funeral in waiting.Built around Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s voiced lamentations on a vanishing frozen world, along with archival footage of his family, it’s no simple howl of grief, even when it takes us to a publicly held memorial in 2019 for Iceland’s Ok glacier, the first such “death” diagnosis in the country’s history.

Rather, Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general.“Time and Water” is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.Dosa has finessed this emotional-meets-elemental space before in her Academy Award-nominated 2022 documentary “Fire of Love,” about married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft.

That was a wonderfully eccentric romance forged in molten lava.Here, she’s in a collaboration of sorts with her subjects, both human and elemental.

Magnason’s opening narration over spectacular footage of glaciers — up close and from far away — gently informs us that we’re watching a time capsule, one where the bonds of family and environment are intertwined.Sara Dosa’s Sundance prize-winning film tells the story of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft using their own extraordinary footage.We...