On April 8th, please join us for a trip to the magical land of Iceland.
Our upcoming screening of Sara Dosa’s exceptional new documentary Time and Water at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock marks the third year that we have partnered with AMFA and the Arkansas Cinema Society — and the third time in a row that we have screened a new film from the highly esteemed National Geographic Documentary Films.
HSDFF sponsors and All Access passholders get a discount on tickets. Purchase tickets here.
A couple of months ago, when I learned about AMFA’s upcoming exhibit “A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time,” I knew that we simply had to screen Sara’s new documentary, which ties together elements of time, memory, family, and landscape into a beautiful cinematic package.
Now that I have seen both the film and the exhibit, the screening indeed seems like a perfect fit.
What I love about Nat Geo Doc Films is the variety, depth, beauty, and quality of the films that they distribute. From the Oscar-winning Free Solo (one of my personal doc favorites) to the emotionally wrenching Sugarcane and last year’s stirring portrait of pathbreaking astronaut Sally Ride, Sally, you can always count on Nat Geo Doc Films to educate, enthrall and inspire you.
The same can be said of the filmmaker Sara Dosa. Her sublime Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary Fire of Love, featuring ravishing footage of exploding volcanoes and oozing lava flows, showcased the life’s work of the volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft. Prior to Fire of Love, Sara’s delightful and quirky 2019 documentary The Seer and the Unseen followed an Icelandic grandmother and "seer" who communicates with elves to protect nature from destruction. (You read that right, an Icelandic grandmother who communicates with elves...)
In Time and Water, Sara returns to Iceland; this time in collaboration with the Icelandic writer, poet, and filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason.
The film is a moving multi-generational story that tracks the relationship between Icelanders, including Andri’s family, and the unique landscape of this magical country, in particular, its glaciers.
As climate change continues to wreak havoc, one of its casualties is the seemingly timeless glacier. These rivers of ice take hundreds of thousands of years to form but are now threatened with extinction. In fact, as one of the country’s most prominent poets, Andri is tapped to write a memorial for one such glacier that is about to disappear forever.
The film screens at 6:30 PM, but I highly recommend that you arrive early to take in AMFA’s thoroughly engaging exhibit. Strolling from one work of art to another, I was struck by how each of the various sections — “Slow Time,” “For the Duration,” “Aging and Erosion,” “Marking Time,” and “A Sense of Pause” — not only offered a unifying theme for the different works of art, but also conveyed a compelling subtext to the museum goer: stop, pay attention and reflect. After all, nothing lasts forever, not even the glaciers of Iceland.
-Ken