At the Zurich Film Festival, the Now/Future section explores the pressing challenges of the present and the question of strategies for the future. With TIME AND WATER, the section presents the new film by Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa about the disappearance of glaciers. In this interview, Dosa discusses her motivation behind the film.
1. After your Oscar-nominated documentary FIRE OF LOVE, which explored a story shaped by fire, TIME AND WATER turns to another elemental force: ice and water. What drew you to this story?
Like the volcanoes of FIRE OF LOVE, the powerful elemental force of glaciers provided a way of thinking about our precarious humanity in relation to the expanse of geologic time: about the brevity of our own lives, and what it means for what we create, inherit, destroy, and lose to be set against such a vast scale. But with TIME AND WATER, I was particularly moved by the idea that glaciers are also a kind of Archive of Earth's history, freezing our planet's processes over millions of years in the ice. Paralleling that idea with lauded Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s own family archives felt creatively exciting to me, especially as he was contemplating what it meant to say goodbye to glaciers that he, and the generations before him, had perceived as eternal.
I was also devastated by, and deeply curious about, the question: what is Iceland without ice? What cultural, political, and ecological relations and forms of knowledge that are so centrally linked to identity and history, are lost as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet? The film became a way to sit with that grief as well as the love for family and home, while also asking what it means to remember and to bear witness, as well as to act before what once seemed permanent now radically transforms.
2. One of the film's most striking qualities is how it approaches the climate crisis through a personal story, memory, family, and human experience. What led you to this approach?
One of our advisors on the film, Thorvardur Arnason, spoke about how important it is to speak personally about global issues, especially those that feel so immense that they become difficult to grasp, or, as with the climate crisis, so obscured and hijacked by political discourse that the scientific facts alone can no longer penetrate. Speaking from the heart can allow others to do the same, creating connection and understanding in the face of global tragedy. For me, Andri’s family offered a deeply moving way into that larger story: his grandparents knew and loved the glaciers as a living, enduring presence, and only two generations later, Andri is having to say goodbye to them through the eulogy to Ok Glacier he is asked to write. That is a profoundly personal grief, but it also opens up into something universal. The more intimate the story becomes, the more it can help us feel the stakes of what we are losing, and perhaps find a sense of community and agency in how we respond to these myriad and existential crises.
Also, I think Andri’s personal family story is full of joy. Love courses through the archival material, from his grandfather’s dahlia slides to Andri’s own home videos of his children. Life, encoded in his family’s stories and records, bursts like fireworks on an Icelandic New Year’s Eve throughout the film. In any story about loss, especially one that focuses on the death of a glacier, there must be a deep understanding of life. It is essential to me that we feel the stakes of the crisis by mapping all that we love onto what is disappearing: the people, places, memories, and ways of knowing that are held in relationship with the landscapes that we call home.
3. TIME AND WATER is screening in Zurich Film Festival's Now/Future section, which focuses on urgent issues of the present while also asking how we might shape a better future. How does the film speak to both of those dimensions: the reality we face today and the possibilities that still lie ahead?
It was our intention to land the film on a note of «agentive uncertainty» to emphasize the idea that the future feels dire, but it is unwritten, so what we do now matters. Glaciers are in fact still alive, so we can still love them and fight for what still remains. We thought this approach would be effective as too much hope can lull us into complacency, while too much dread paralyzes us into nihilism, shutting down the possibility of climate justice. Uncertainty, however, invites agency: it reminds us that our actions in this unstable present shape the world our loved ones will inherit.
In the film, Andri beautifully speaks about the idea of the «handshake of generations» as a way to grasp the seemingly abstract concept of the future, making us feel that our actions in the present really do matter. Towards the end, we see Andri’s grandmother Hulda share her memories of glaciers with his daughter, also named Hulda. The possibility that his daughter may one day share her great-grandmother’s stories with her own great-granddaughter illustrates how the future becomes less abstract when we understand it as part of an unbroken human continuum, one in which we are both inheritors and ancestors.
4. Do you see your film as an act of remembrance, a call to action, or something else entirely?
I see it as both. I am moved by stories that are acts of imagination that posit alternative ways of thinking about the future, and that was something our team hoped to achieve with TIME AND WATER. I was very inspired by the idea that – the way the past is represented – often are utilized as fodder for imagining the future. But archives are subjective. They are situated within the political, historical, cultural, and economic matrices of their respective eras. At this moment, when there are so many dominant stories that frame nature as a resource to exploit, or the climate crisis as manufactured alarmism, I believe it is all the more important to make visible archives that can dream outside of those ways of thinking.
I see our film as composed of archives, but also as a kind of «future archive» itself. It holds memories of the glaciers, the people who loved them, and the worlds they made possible. At the same time, it offers an imaginative basis for a future in which glaciers are still alive, and in which we have chosen to organize our lives, economies, and relationships to the natural world in ways that make that possible.
5. If anything – what do you hope audiences carry with them after the film ends?
I hope that audiences will viscerally feel the vitality and life-force of glaciers, feeling for them emotionally and understanding how intricately connected they are with all water on earth. I also hope that audiences will understand how our human stories and memories are embedded in all the landscapes we call home, feeling the love and life as well as the potential loss. In this way, I hope audiences will feel like they themselves have their own arms outstretched in their own handshake of generations, knowing that they can carry the past with them as well as touch and impact futures beyond their own individual lives.
6. Was there a particular moment during filming that changed the way you understood the story, or that stayed with you after production ended?
The first time I stepped inside of a glacial ice cave changed the way I understood the story. I felt transported into both the cosmos and some sort of womb at once. The way the ice freezes is bafflingly multidimensional: it traps soil, ash, leaves, particulates and other things, suspending it frozen. From inside a glacier, the ice really does look like images of nebula and astronomical phenomena. That cosmic imagery really made me feel connected to the expanse of time.
But despite that sensation of an epic scale, there is something at once so intimate about the ice, too. Hearing the water rushing, or the heartbeat like groans and creaks did feel like we were in a body of sorts; it made me and our team feel the life of this abiotic landscape.
This cosmically big and intimately small duality made me feel in touch with my own human precarity. However, then realizing that we, these tiny humans with our fleeting lives, are destroying these once massive glaciers for short-term political and economic gain was crushing. And it caused making the film to feel all the more urgent and motivating.
TIME AND WATER will be shown as part of the Now/Future section at the 22nd Zurich Film Festival. The complete program will be published on the website on Wednesday, September 9, starting at 12:00 PM. Ticket sales begin on Monday, September 14, 2026.
About Director Sara Dosa
The American filmmaker is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature. Her films have been nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA, and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and have won a Peabody Award and a Directors Guild of America Award. Her directorial credits include FIRE OF LOVE, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2023, as well as THE LAST SEASON and THE SEER & THE UNSEEN. As a producer, she has been involved in films such as AUDRIE & DAISY, SURVIVORS, THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY, and AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER. Dosa studied at Wesleyan University and earned a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and international development studies from the London School of Economics.
