‘Time And Water’: National Geographic Reteams With Oscar Nominee Sara Dosa On “Beautiful, Painful, Existential Film” – CPH:DOX

Filmmaker Sara Dosa is going from the molten to the melting, from fiery volcanoes to dissolving glaciers.

Dosa earned an Academy Award nomination for 2022’s Fire of Lovethe story of vulcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft who furthered the world’s understanding of intense geological forces, but whose lives were claimed in a volcanic eruption. In her latest, Time and Watershe returns to the panoramic beauty of nature but this time in the frosty terrain of Iceland. The documentary, which premiered at Sundance, screened several times at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and plays again at the festival on Sunday.

“Everything is bigger in Iceland. The landscapes, the elements, the depth of time,” the CPH:DOX program writes of Time and Water. “This is where author Andri Snær Magnason grew up, and where he has lived and worked his entire life. Now he is experiencing something that no one in his family ever dreamed could happen: a dying glacier. The ice is melting, the climate is changing – and with it, everything has changed forever.”

The program adds, “Sara Dosa joins forces with Andri to create a beautiful, painful and existential film about profound changes in both life and the world.”

The project reunites Dosa and producer Shane Boris (Oscar nominee for Fire of Love and Oscar winner for Navalny) with National Geographic. At the CPH:Conference earlier this week, they took the stage with NatGeo’s Carolyn Bernstein, EVP Global Scripted Content and Documentary Films, to discuss their collaboration on Time and Water. Dosa explained she first met her protagonist, an Icelandic author and filmmaker, while working on her 2019 film The Seer and the Unseenwhich also took place in Iceland.

“When we were making that film, everybody told us, ‘You must meet Andri Snær Magnason.’ He’s a celebrated writer, a poet, sci-fi writer, public intellectual. He even was enlisted to run for president. So, all to say we were very excited to meet him on that film,” Dosa told the moderator, journalist and programmer Anthony Kaufman, adding that the idea for Time and Water came from reading an article Magnason wrote titled “How Do Say Goodbye to a Glacier?,” which examined the death of Okjökull, an Icelandic glacier that was declared moribund after it shed layer after layer of thickness due to climate change.

“I read that [article] and 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. “Being a writer whose work that I loved so dearly, he seemed like the perfect guide through these troubling times.”

Boris also produced The Seer and the Unseenvery much an independent production. The fortunes of director and producer changed with Fire of Lovewhich Sandbox Films supported and NatGeo later acquired out of Sundance.

“That was the first time we got paid for our work and we could make a film, have a budget and a schedule that we could keep,” Boris said. “We also didn’t imagine ever working with NatGeo when we made that film. It was beyond our wildest expectations.”

When Bernstein and her team saw the finished Fire of Love at Sundance, she recalled, “We were completely captivated in a way that happens rarely, actually. We said, ‘We must do whatever we can to make this film a National Geographic film.’ So, in my recollection, we met, we fell in love and then we started working together.”

As Bernstein noted during the CPH:DOX conversation, NatGeo only backs about four films per year.

“There are things that, all across our slate, each of our films have in common. We talk about science, adventure, and exploration as being three of the big kind of subject areas for our brand, for our films,” she said. “If you think about Fire of Love — science, adventure, and exploration are all there in a really big way. Yes, the film is a collage, a pastiche, it’s an art project, but it’s also a hero’s journey, which is something that I’m always very focused on, about people or a person, but in this case, two people who are on some kind of journey. 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 was a total no-brainer for us. I did not have to fight for it. I didn’t have to convince anyone. I showed it to my boss and she said, yes, go, go, go. It was a movie that was a perfect bullseye for our brand.”

Conflict is a critical part of almost every cinematic story, be it nonfiction or fiction. But on Time and Waterthere was a notable absence of that between the filmmaking team and the executives, the panelists agreed. “We never had an argument or a real conflict,” Bernstein insisted. “It doesn’t mean that everything I tell them I’m thinking or feeling when I see a rough cut, they say, ‘Oh my God, this is an amazing idea. We should definitely do that.’ I don’t expect them to do that. There are things that make sense to them and things… where you were like, ‘That’s interesting, but that’s not the journey that we’re on. That’s not the vision, that’s not exactly what Sara’s vision is.’”

Boris did acknowledge that some ‘input’ can sting.

“When you get a note and you’re early on in the process, it sometimes hurts,” he conceded. “You deliver a cut and you think that you’re making progress. And sometimes there’s a note that says, ‘That’s not working.’ And that can be disruptive to your process. And that happened on Time and Water. We’re going in a direction, and we think that’s the direction and we get outside feedback and the directions weren’t aligned.”

By way of example, he shared, “We had a version where Andri is putting a plaque on the glacier that’s declared dead… That was in the first act and now it’s in the third act. And when we put it in the first act, we thought that was going to work. And it might have worked a different film. We could have figured that out, but we worked on it and we shaped it and we put it in the third act and that ultimately felt like best place for the film.”

He continued, “We wanted to share the film to let NatGeo know how we were progressing, how the film was changing. And I don’t think we would have continued to do that if there wasn’t an understanding that ultimately, we would be able to make the film that the film wanted to be.”

Time and Water is expected to get a robust awards campaign as the year progresses. Thematically, there are some parallels between this project and Dosa’s Fire of Loveand notable distinctions.

“They both deal with geologic time as well as how us small humans are making sense of the enormity of nature,” Dosa observed. “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 was very important to distinguish this. It is a very different story. It tells a multi-generational story centered on Andri Snær Magnason… It’s kind of a love letter to Iceland and to glaciers.”