Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his own family archive into a meditation on loss in Time and Water, a 2026 documentary directed by Sara Dosa.
What is Time and Water about?
Time and Water follows Magnason as he confronts two overlapping losses: the retreat of his country's glaciers and the passing of his grandparents. Rather than treating climate change as an abstract statistic, the film grounds it in personal memory, using old family footage, letters, and recollections as a way of measuring what has quietly disappeared over a single lifetime. Magnason's archive becomes a kind of time capsule, holding onto family, memory, and the physical presence of ice and water before they are gone. The documentary moves between intimate domestic scenes and the vast, changing Icelandic landscape, letting the two scales inform each other rather than competing for attention.
About the cast
Andri Snær Magnason appears as himself, serving as both subject and narrator, with his family's own archival material forming much of the film's visual foundation. Director Sara Dosa builds the documentary around his voice and perspective rather than outside experts.
Context & significance
Iceland's glaciers have become one of the most visible symbols of climate change, and the film joins a growing body of documentary work that treats environmental loss as a matter of personal and generational memory rather than pure data. By anchoring the story in one family's archive, Time and Water asks what it means to inherit a landscape that is actively vanishing, and how personal record-keeping can stand in for what science alone cannot fully convey.
Watching Time and Water on Ktime
Time and Water can be watched on K-Time with a free account login, while this page itself is free to read without signing in. The documentary includes Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making it accessible to Farsi-speaking viewers as part of K-Time's growing library of internationally recognized nonfiction film.