00:11I'm not ready to say goodbye.
00:18I cannot send you a glacier.
00:23But at least I can send you this.
00:31You know, what's very interesting, it's very much in your voice,
00:34but yet translating the voice from page into a documentary of sorts
00:40with all this footage.
00:42Could you talk about that initial sort of meeting between the two of you
00:46and how, because you wanted to take on your sort of persona,
00:50but you also wanted to speak further, I would think.
00:53I gather all this, as you could see, all my life, and it expands my life also.
01:01It's grandfather's 16mm from the 50s, my mother's 8mm from the 70s,
01:09and what I start in the 90s.
01:10And interesting enough, I don't catch the quality of the 50s until around 2005,
01:19which is an interesting aspect.
01:23So then I do the book, and the book is very expensive,
01:28and I also do lots of lectures.
01:32And basically, I hand all of this over to Sarah in trust.
01:39Of course, I have my own ideas of how I might want to see it or special directions,
01:46but I'm also very curious just to see how this unfolds in the hands of Sarah.
01:55And the great challenge is still, so we have sometimes explained it as almost like siblings.
02:03That is, I create my book and my work from a special ground,
02:11but she plants a tree in the same ground, and it becomes like a sibling.
02:16It's not the same species, but it's from the same ground.
02:19It's not the same species, but it's not the same species.
02:26Hello.
02:28Hello.
02:29Hello.
02:34I hope that this will reach you.
02:37I am speaking to you from the year 2026.
02:44We are a family of firsts.
02:47My grandparents were some of the first to explore Iceland's glaciers.
02:52But I became the first to say goodbye to something we never thought we could lose.
03:05Sarah, can you talk, did this happen after Fire of Love or was this before?
03:10Because Fire of Love is so much about family set against the natural world.
03:14And this is in a similar way, but very, very different.
03:18Yeah.
03:18So I first reached out to Andre before Fire of Love in 2019.
03:23I had known of his work for some time and was very inspired by it.
03:27But he published an article in The Guardian entitled How Do You Say Goodbye to a Glacier?
03:31And when I read that article, I was deeply moved and I reached out to him about the prospects of
03:37making a film together.
03:38However, the, you know, COVID hit, we all went into lockdown and the film that I was thinking about, you
03:46know, making with Andre would have required new production and that was impossible under lockdown.
03:50And so my collaborators and I instead, we ended up making Fire of Love because it was an archival film
03:55and we could do it during lockdown.
03:58But having that experience under my belt, then, you know, when I was finishing Fire of Love, Andre had come
04:04out with his book on time and water.
04:06So we both kind of met each other again in this new moment after our conversations years before.
04:13And it was kind of like the time was right to start talking again about the film.
04:18And we began kind of our conversations that led to the film that you now see.
04:29Our glaciers contain a volcanic eruption from 1918, another from 1983, one from 2004, and 2011.
05:03Andre, thank you very much.
05:05Yeah, it's a very personal, obviously, story, because it's so connected to generations, the whole aspect of like the folk
05:13songs and everything is so undeniably primal, but yet so specific to that area.
05:20Could you talk about sort of because it's hard to let somebody in, but it's also there's so much material
05:26would seem that how do you know what you would like to have said in terms of the archival versus
05:33what said in the book, because the book can be sort of an internalization that sort of people see in
05:38their own mind's eye.
05:39Yes.
05:40Yes.
05:40So it's many layers.
05:42So like the initial layer is coming from like climate change as an issue.
05:53Like me as a storyteller here now, I met this climate scientist in Potsdam and he asked me, why don't
05:58you write about climate change?
06:00And I told him, I'm not a scientist.
06:02And I told him, I'm not a scientist.
06:02I don't have authority.
06:05You know, my doctor's a, my doctor, my father is a doctor and he hates it when normal people give
06:11medical advice.
06:12So, but he told me people don't understand data, they understand stories.
06:18And not only do I have permission to talk about climate change, but I, it might be my civil duty.
06:24And then I tell my friends, I'm going to write about climate change.
06:28And they are all like, oh, roll their eyes and say like, oh, kill me.
06:32I'm not going to invite you for a party the next five years.
06:36But the next time they asked me, it's, I tell them I'm writing about time and water.
06:42And then they were like, wow, that's interesting.
06:44What do you mean?
06:44And I say in the next 100 years, every element of water on our planet is simultaneously going out of
06:51balance.
06:52The glaciers going down, the sea level up, the pH level reaching a level not seen for 50 million years.
06:58The amplification of storms, the seasons, the rain, the snow, the permafrost, just everything being intercepted.
07:06And then they're like, well, that's serious.
07:09And I say, yes, it's serious.
07:11Some people call it climate change.
07:14And then it comes to kind of writing about it and what stories I could bring to the table.
07:22And then, of course, these honeymoons from the 50s were a very obvious choice.
07:29Bubbles in the ice hold ancient air that tells stories of seasons past.
07:35Their warmth, their cold, their precipitations, their pollens, their pollutants.
07:50My grandparents were some of the first to touch this archive of deep time.
07:55But at the same time, I got an invite to interview the Dalai Lama.
08:01And I go to India to interview him with the idea of the melting glaciers in the Himalayas and the
08:09connection to the frozen mythological cow.
08:13But he just laughs out this cow question and tells me that they lack research.
08:20I should go and talk to the Icelandic Glacial Research Society to understand glaciers.
08:26So I go to the furthest person in the world to ask for wisdom.
08:29And he says, go home and talk to your grandmother.
08:32So in a strange way, the book is maybe a bit more of a Forrest Gump story.
08:39I go to this furthest person in the world and then, but all of these stories are included.
08:46And when you choose what to use in a film, I was surprised like how Sarah and her team chose.
08:59Because we have a saying in Icelandic, the guest's eye is wise.
09:03I would always have aimed for the, you could say, the low hanging fruit, the Dalai Lama interview.
09:11But she went deeper into my archives and found my quirky interviews with grandfather Jon,
09:18where he's consulting with the elf woman and giving advice of it never, you should never save money and always
09:27make mistakes.
09:28So I think the guest's eye was seeing things that were maybe too close to me to see.
09:35And I think that my vulnerable part in this was when the camera was tilting a bit too much towards
09:41me.
09:42And I wasn't really sure if I wanted to expose myself so much or have it so personal.
09:49I was okay with having a voice, but I became a bit of a deer in the headlights when it
09:54came too close.
10:05I want you to know glaciers as my grandparents did.
10:12To hold eyes is to hold the earth's memories in your hand.
10:16I want you to know, you're alone.
10:20You're alone.
10:21I want you to know what you're doing.
10:22I'm not alone.
10:23I want you to know what you're doing.
10:25I'm not alone.
10:26Sarah, could you talk about looking then at structure, you know, looking with your eye and your vision and seeing
10:33how,
10:34because the way you've constructed obviously fire, love, and now this, it's very lyrical.
10:38But I mean, even like the veins of air in the glaciers, it's like our lifeblood.
10:44There's it's not overplaying it. It's sort of a great metaphor, yet shown on a very practical level.
10:50I think for me, collaboration is the heart of everything that we do as a team.
10:56And kind of working with Andre's family story with Andre himself was a tremendous gift.
11:01And so listening to him, what felt authentically true to him and to his family was our North Star in
11:08guiding the process.
11:10It was really important to us also to create kind of a kinship between a human story and the nature
11:16story and specifically Andre's family and in kinship with glaciers.
11:22I think, you know, when Andre is talking about like going into the depths of the archives, I was so
11:28moved by his grandparents.
11:29They were very different from my own grandparents and yet totally reminded me of them.
11:34And I think when you come across characters in any kind of story, especially in a documentary film, who can
11:41bring a world to life, who can make you feel and laugh and cry.
11:45That's just such a gift. And so we had these wonderful characters in Andre's family to work with,
11:52whose own experience with glaciers and with oceans and the, you know, entangled ecology of Iceland could bring people who
12:00have never been to Iceland close,
12:01where the landscapes could feel imbued with meaning, with life of cultural resonance that was quite powerful for us to
12:10work with.
12:11And so that allowed us to then kind of braid these stories, specifically the story of Andre's grandfather, Aruni, who's
12:18losing his memory,
12:19with the glaciers who, you know, as an archive of planetary memory are being lost as well.
12:25So we thought that that juxtaposition could help provide a very kind of human and accessible thoroughfare into a topic
12:33as overwhelming as the climate crisis.
12:35And that's something that Andre does so beautifully in his writing, and that was very apparent in the archive itself.
12:42So those were the things that we began to work with in the process of making the film.
12:54My sense of home is slipping away.
13:05I don't know.
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