Sara Dosa on Mourning the Death of a Glacier in ‘Time and Water’

Sara Dosa, the director of Oscar nominated “Fire of Love,” was prompted to make her latest film, “Time and Water,” after reading an article by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason about the death of a glacier, known as Okjökull. The article was titled “How Do You Say Goodbye to a Glacier?”

“I just felt like it was such a profound question to ask at this time of the climate crisis, when so many of us are grappling with how do we make sense of these unfathomable losses,” Dosa said, speaking at the Copenhagen documentary festival CPH:DOX on Tuesday. Dosa then sought to re-establish ties with Magnason, who had served as a consultant on Dosa’s “The Seer and the Unseen,” and Magnason became the central character in “Time and Water.”

There are some continuities between “Fire of Love” and “Time and Water,” Dosa said. “They both deal with geologic time as well as how us, these small humans, are making sense of the enormity of nature. And they’re both critically engaging with archival material. They both tell stories of love, but in very different ways. But it was really important to us to make sure this was not like a sequel. We joked at the very beginning that maybe this was ‘Ice of Love,’ but, again, it’s very important to distinguish this. It is a very different story.”

The film, Dosa said, “tells a multi-generational story centered on Magnason’s life and work, and his relationship with his grandparents. And it’s kind of a love letter to Iceland and to glaciers.”

Dosa described the film as a “multi-dimensional collage.” “Finding its form was very challenging because we had a plethora of materials,” she explained. “We had Andri’s grandparents’ archive, his parents’ archive and his own archive. We also had Icelandic national archives that we were working with, along with our own original shooting that we did in Iceland on glaciers. We had Andri’s writing to work with, and we are also crafting original writing in the process.”

Dosa was joined on stage for the discussion about “Time and Water” at CPH:DOX by one of the film’s producers, Shane Boris, who was also a producer on “Fire of Love,” as well as the Oscar winner “Navalny,” and Carolyn Bernstein, exec VP, documentary films at National Geographic, which acquired “Fire of Love” out of Sundance and came on board “Time and Water” at an early stage. The film had its world premiere at Sundance.

Bernstein explained that a few months after working together on the release and awards run of “Fire of Love,” she had lunch with Dosa and Boris, and they both talked about this idea of “pancake sci-fi,” a term that Magnason — who was in the audience at the Copenhagen discussion — had made up. Boris explained, “I think just the essence of it is a science fiction that exists in a world where you’re sitting around a table with your family eating pancakes, and this was a version of science fiction that we were really drawn to: a familial, intimate, human science fiction.”

Dosa added, “Yeah, Andri puts it best, and does such an extraordinary job articulating abstract concepts in general, but the way he writes about the future, as you know, so many people think of the future as this abstract thing, but you can instead imagine your own child, or someone you love who’s young, who exists in this present time as an elder eating pancakes at a table with their own beloved child, be they blood or chosen family. That allows you to imagine the future in a different kind of way, where you can care for it, where it feels like, I think you put it, Andri, like grandparents instead of robots, and it becomes — not that we, you know, dislike robots — but it becomes caring and human. So it is that kind of aesthetic of bringing in kind of family warmth and a feeling of the future as intimate time that I feel like really kind of speaks to this idea of pancake sci-fi.”

Talking about the production process, Bernstein said, “I kind of understood that with this movie, the early rough cuts that we saw were part of their process of discovery, process of experimentation.” Unlike some other Nat Geo movies, like E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s “The Rescue,” for example, where “we knew what the shape of the story was — beginning, middle and end,” she said, “with this movie, it was much more of a leap of faith.”

Boris said, “We had our concerns when we developed and made the film with Nat Geo, but as we continued to do it, it was clear that there was an understanding of the process … that making a documentary film is a process of discovery. It’s about having a vision, but also coming to find the full form of the film.”

Talking about the kind of notes she would deliver to filmmakers, as the commissioner, Bernstein said, “One of the things that really skilled and experienced filmmakers do is try to understand the note behind the note. I’ve been on the producing side, and I’ve also been on the commissioning side in my career over many years, and the note behind the note is always the key, because people in my position give a lot of feedback and a lot of notes, but it’s not the letter of the note, it’s the spirit of the note. And I feel like Sara and her team were very good at and respectful about understanding what, in a big picture way, we were looking for.”

Boris underscored the importance of trust between the commissioner and filmmakers. “When we’re pitching a film, you have to make a coherent story, knowing the information that you have at the time, and you say like, this is what the film is going to be, and you have to know that that’s not necessarily what the film is going to be,” he said. “And I think that that’s a dance that the filmmakers and the executives play with each other, where we both know that we’re doing our best job to tell you what the story is, and we both know that that might not be the film that’s finished at the end of the day. And I think that requires trust, and it requires a good story, a good framing to start, and a good finished film at the end.”

Dosa added, “Sometimes, though, if it can tip over too much, to be too framed, too strategic, it can do a disservice to the creative process, because it changes your orientation point, and so that’s where I think that, like sticking true, it can be really challenging. It’s very different from this film, but I’ll just say that ‘The Seer and the Unseen’ is a film about the belief in the invisible spirits of nature, and it was extremely hard to get funding for that project. And we almost got funding, but we were told we have to make the protagonist crazy or produce a real elf. That was an actual note that we got. And we’re just like, ‘No, we’re not … She’s not crazy. This is a treasured person in our life, someone we really respect and believe in, and this is also a cultural reality for many people.’ So I’ll just say there’s always a dance of like, ‘No, we’re not going to sacrifice … We’re not going to undermine the reality and the respect of our people,’ and that’s why we’re so lucky to be able to work with people who we trust so deeply from the beginning. So there’s a dance: Trying to kind of really figure out how we’re going to be able to tell the story when there’s so many unknowns from the beginning, yet there’s kind of, yeah, the trust that we can see it through together.”

Bernstein set out National Geographic’s approach to documentary feature films. “We have a very small slate of films. We have about four films a year that we support. Three of the four are usually original commissions that we work on from the inception of the idea; about one a year is an acquisition that we find at film festivals like this one,” she said. “So because we only work on four films a year, we are able to have a bespoke strategy around each film and yet there are things that our films have in common. So we talk about science, adventure and exploration as being three of the big subject areas.”

“Fire of Love,” which centers on two volcanologists, had been “a total no brainer for us,” Bernstein said. As well as fitting into the science, adventure and exploration categories, “it’s also a hero’s journey, which is something that I’m always very focused on — about a person, or people, in this case two people, who are on some kind of journey,” she said. “There are obstacles along the way that they have to overcome. There are highs and lows. And a story that feels both incredibly specific and universal at the same time is another thing I’m always looking for. ‘Fire of Love’ ticked every single box of the kind of movie that I’m looking for from a storytelling perspective. The fact that it was an elevated, authored film was the icing on the cake.”

Bernstein added, “For us, we certainly want our films to perform well on streaming, but we’re also thinking about other things. We’re thinking about box office. We’re thinking about awards, and box office and awards help with the performance on streaming. So all of these things are connected.”