Is Iceland dying? Is the world dying? These would appear to be the very relevant questions behind this well-intentioned but ultimately exasperating and obtuse documentary from National Geographic, which is burdened with tasteful NatGeo stateliness and visually pleasing production values.
It is directed by film-maker Sara Dosa, whose earlier documentary Fire of Love was about doomed vulcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, who in 1991 perished in the eruption they were studying. Now Dosa has made a study of award-winning Icelandic climate author Andri Snær Magnason, whose book on climate change Of Time And Water was published in 2019 and who wrote a piercingly sad “obituary” of the Ok glacier, the first Icelandic glacier completely to disappear. It very clearly won’t be the last.
And yet what is the tone of this film? Anger? Or elegiac blandness? Apparently the latter. The glaciers are melting in the north for the same reason that the global south is heating up to an unbearable 50C and beyond, with obvious implications for geopolitical stability and migration. But this film, unhurriedly recounting Icelandic history and myth along with the author’s own family tales, seems intent in showing us Magnason’s sweet but frankly pointless home-movie videos of his grandparents at interminable length, accompanied by sugary ambient music and his own murmurings and maunderings about the fact that the Iceland they knew is fading away.
The funeral scenes for these elders are affecting, yes. But frankly, this inert and indulgent video footage is not a treasure trove of material. And finally the author is shown addressing crowds saying, “We know what needs to be done.” Yes, we do: reduce carbon emissions, but time is running out. Overall this is a frustrating and rather precious piece of work.