Her most up-to-date work, “Time and Water,” which was filmed primarily close to the Vatnajökull ice cap in the south of Iceland, and former glacier Okjökull in the western nook of the island, premiered at Sundance in January 2026. In this chapter, she digs into the story of award-winning Icelandic local weather writer Andri Snær Magnason’s grandparents, Hulda and Árn, and the simultaneous disappearance of certainly one of the Icelandic glaciers that has been the backdrop to so many milestones in the couple’s lives.
Ahead, the director tells us about the process of filming in Icelandic weather, the inventive connection she discovered with Magnason, and extra.
A gathering of minds
It’s necessary to first perceive the considerate collaboration between Dosa and Magnason—the latter penned the e-book “On Time and Water” (2019) and wrote the obituary plaque for Okjökull (Ok) glacier’s funeral service, which you’ll be able to see put in on the volcano that used to accommodate the ice. “Andrí and I met while working on ‘The Seer and the Unseen,’” Dosa says. “The way he puts ideas together is so unexpected and unique. I had a long conversation with him about the cultural representation of elves in Iceland, economic politics, and environmental politics—what he shared in that initial meeting really helped my approach to telling the story of ‘The Seer and the Unseen.’”
And as most inventive collaborations go, it didn’t finish there. “In 2019, an article Magnason wrote came out, centered around how to say goodbye to a glacier. I was so moved by it, and then I saw that Andrí had written it,” Dosa shares. “So I reached out to him to start a conversation around turning that article into a film, even before his book came out.”
When geology turns into family tree
The movie acts as a love letter, each to historical chunks of ice and to 2 individuals who beloved them deeply for what they had been. “Andri would always say, Iceland is encoded in an invisible layer of stories,” Dosa says. There is a crew of predominant characters dancing in the highlight right here, each of flesh and ice. The movie peppers archival footage of Hulda and Árn’s life collectively (that’s, Andrí’s grandparents) alongside putting pictures of glaciers in repose. Subtle audio tracks the sound of ice on the transfer, views of clouds passing over glass-like ice, and there’s the eventual memorial for Ok. The movie slowly sheds its predominant characters—receding ice, a grandfather misplaced, and a grandmother slipping away final.