A documentary about a disappearing Icelandic glacier and the poet asked to memorialise it lands on National Geographic this Friday, with Disney+ the following Saturday — and it arrives with Oscar buzz already attached.

Time and Water, directed by Oscar nominee Sara Dosa, is the filmmaker's fifth documentary feature. It traces the writings and family history of Andri Snær Magnason, an Icelandic poet, novelist and essayist whose work sits at the intersection of personal storytelling and climate reckoning. The film is a National Geographic Documentary Films production, produced by Oscar winner Shane Boris, Elijah Stevens and Jameka Autry, with Signpost Pictures and Compass listed as production partners and Sandbox Films among its backers. Deadline

At the film's centre is Okjökull, the Ok glacier — roughly 700 years old when it vanished in 2014, the first of Iceland's smaller glaciers to disappear entirely. Magnason was tasked with commemorating the loss. His words were etched into copper and fastened to the rock that the retreating ice had uncovered, a kind of geological plaque marking what had been. Sundance Film Festival

Magnason is a public figure in Iceland beyond his literary work. He was enlisted to run for president of Iceland in 2016. His breadth of roles — memoirist, activist, presidential candidate — gives the film its structure, threading one family's history through the larger story of a changing landscape.

The documentary's score weaves in rímur, the epic rhyming poems that Icelanders have passed down orally across centuries. That musical choice roots the film in a tradition of spoken preservation — stories held in the voice before they are held on the page.

Dosa earned her Oscar nomination for Fire of Love (2022), the story of two French volcanologists. That film was also produced by Shane Boris, who won Oscars for Fire of Love and Navalny (2022). In October 2023, Dosa and Boris signed a first-look deal with National Geographic Documentary Films — an arrangement giving the studio first refusal on their projects. Time and Water is the first film to emerge under that deal. Deadline

The film has travelled widely. It screened in the Premieres section at Sundance in 2026, and went on to play SXSW, Sheffield DocFest, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Hot Docs in Toronto, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Doxa in Vancouver, festivals in Sydney and Perth, and the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta. It won the editing award at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival in Poland. Its New York premiere took place at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and it opened at the Roxie theatre in San Francisco on 5 June 2026. Deadline · Margaret Mead Film Festival, via Deadline

National Geographic lists the runtime at 93 minutes and rates the film PG. Dosa discussed the project on the Doc Talk podcast — a production of Deadline and John Ridley's Nō Studios, hosted by Ridley (an Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave) and Matt Carey, Deadline's senior documentary editor. The episode is available on Spotify, iHeart and Apple Podcasts. Deadline

Deadline has cited Time and Water as an expected contender in the 2027 documentary Oscar race. Whether it lands a nomination is a matter for the Academy's voters. For now, the film reaches its widest audience this weekend, when a glacier that no longer exists is remembered on two of the biggest platforms in the business.