Original subtitles

[pickaxe thudding]

[equipment rattles]

[something opens]

[film projector whirring]

[♪ gentle music playing]

[♪ gentle music playing]

[microphone tapping]

[Andri] Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

I hope that this will reach you.

We will never meet because we live in different times.

I cannot send you a glacier,

but at least I can send you this.

[♪ theme music playing]

[projector whirring]

[jungle birdsong]

[water lapping]

[insects chirping]

This capsule could have been filled with snakes

from the Amazon.

This boa constrictor on my shoulders belongs to my

favorite uncle, John.

15 years later,

he invites me to help him research the mating habits

of the giant anaconda in Venezuela.

I would have been here,

but these plans conflict with my own mating habits.

[baby exclaims]

So I stay in my own habitat here in Iceland,

writing poetry and science fiction.

[host] Andri Snaer Magnason's book,

"The Story of the Blue Planet"

has garnered significant attention.

This is perhaps the most political Icelandic novel I've

read in a long time.

[Andri] Hulda!

Over there is the glacier tongue, look.

Whoops!

Over there is the glacier.

[Elin] Over there!

[Andri] The first thing I'm sending you is a story that I

used to tell my own kids.

It's about our home.

[♪ stirring music playing]

First, there was the void.

[asteroid whooshing]

Then, fire met the ice.

[explosion booms!]

[water rushing]

In the chaos rose Auohumla, a cow made of frost and snow.

From her body came hundreds of glaciers...

...that carved mountains and valleys.

From her udders ran four rivers that nourished the world.

Her ice made a home here in Iceland,

and Iceland became a home for all of us.

[birds chirping]

[waves crashing]

[bright ethereal music]

[dog barking]

[children chattering]

[♪ bright music playing]

We have lived with the ice for 1,000 years.

[Andri] Smile!

'Isgland'... Isgland?

Is this correct?

[Eilin] Yes.

[Andri] Good job.

[Eilin] Iceland.

[Andri] But that was just the beginning,

and you will need many stories.

[Andri] I can capture the Northern Lights!

Wow!

Look, they're moving.

Wow!

They disappeared - whoa!

[Eilin] They're over here now.

[♪ gentle music playing]

[water rushing]

[Andri] I don't know how old you will be when

you receive this.

I am 53, speaking to you from the year 2026.

And this is what Iceland looks like now.

[♪ stirring music playing]

[lava roars]

[Andri] I don't think I've ever seen anything as beautiful.

How do you like it, girls?

[both] It's awesome.

[♪ bright music playing]

[water rushing]

[Andri] This is such a beautiful path.

[bird hoots]

[Andri hoots back]

- Andri, are you with us? - Yes.

[birds screech]

[♪ bright music playing]

[Andri] My love for this place comes from those who raised me,

my parents and my grandparents.

We are a family of firsts and lasts.

Grandpa Jon was the last in a 1,000-year line to be

born on this farm.

Grandma Disa was the first to laugh always.

[laughter]

[overlapping chatter]

And Grandma Hulda,

the first woman to fly in Iceland.

Grandpa Arni,

one of the first to explore Iceland's glaciers.

But I became the first to say goodbye to something

we never thought we could lose.

[wind]

[wind]

[overlapping chatter]

[singing in foreign language]

[Andri] Now, it's 2019.

My youngest of four kids, Hulda, is turning 11.

[Andri] Wow!

[overlapping chatter]

[Andri] And my last grandparent,

also named Hulda, is still alive.

[Andri] You are living up to high expectations, Hulda.

[Hulda] We Huldas here.

[camera shutter clicks]

[Andri] Grandma Hulda had been married to my grandfather Arni

for 60 years.

Now, the things they love most in the world are

beginning to die.

[reporter] In 2014, Ok Glacier was the first glacier to

die due to climate change.

Now, a funeral commemorating it will be held in August.

This funeral is the first of its kind in the world.

[Andri] A funeral for a glacier feels surreal,

like my sense of home is slipping away.

I had been collecting my grandparents' glacier stories

since I could remember.

And now, suddenly, I see them in a new light.

I have this urge to gather up all of them,

thinking they may be useful for the future.

Let me send you my favorite one,

how my grandparents fell in love on the ice.

This is their footage.

Here they are on their honeymoon in 1956.

And here they are in 2004,

2010, and 2017.

[Hulda] From a young age,

I just craved going to the mountains.

In the springtime, strangely enough,

I start to smell a glacier scent.

[Andri] What is a “glacier scent?”

[Hulda] Well, I can't describe it.

- It was something special.

There was just this smell - it was exhilarating.

[Andri] And when did you meet?

[Hulda] It was a meeting of mountaineers.

[Arni] I liked her right away.

[Hulda] I used to say to my mom,

"Oh, I wish I was a boy, then I could do this and that."

To have more adventures.

I was just up for anything.

Arni says to me, "We are going up to the Vatnajokull glacier."

And I say, "Listen, can I go with you?"

[Arni] The local skiers asked if I was crazy,

taking a woman up to Vatnajokull.

That’s completely ridiculous!

[host] The largest glacier is Vatnajokull,

which covers about one twelfth of Iceland's surface

and is the largest glacier in Europe.

Trips up to Vatnajokull are an act of daring

only for well-equipped and highly experienced mountaineers.

[Hulda] We spent a whole week on the glacier.

[Arni] I don’t think we have parted since.

[Hulda] We got married on Friday,

and left early the next morning for a three-week trip.

After that, we often went up to Vatnajokull Glacier

with the Icelandic Glaciological Society.

[Arni] This was the beginning of the surveying.

These are the same measurements they are taking today.

[gusting wind]

[Arni] Were you ever cold?

[Hulda] No, never cold.

We were newlyweds!

[Andri] Do you consider the glacier to be your second home?

[Hulda] I do.

It’s a different world being on top of a glacier.

Everything is white.

It's just endless.

[film reel unspools]

[Andri] How old are you now?

- I've forgotten everything.

- You're turning 95, my Arni.

- 95? - Yes.

[Arni] Yes, you keep track of this for me.

[Hulda] Yes, yes, I do.

[Arni] Completely.

And you always do.

I don't know how I would have gone through life

if I hadn't had her with me.

[Andri] I want you to know glaciers as my grandparents did.

[wind]

As I do.

[wind]

[distant wind]

[wind and microscopic debris]

[gusting winds]

[blizzard wind]

[ice creaking]

[ice creaking]

[ice creaking]

This is how a glacier sounds.

You can't quite see it, but it's moving.

[ice creaking]

[ice creaking]

When snowfall stacks up long enough, year after year,

the ice grows heavy and starts to move under its own weight.

That movement is what defines a glacier,

ice that has come alive.

[ice rumbling]

A glacier's life unfolds in geologic time,

over centuries and millennia instead of months and years.

Blue is the color of the aged ice.

The deeper the blue, the deeper the time.

As long as winter snowfall exceeds summer melt,

the glacier will keep flowing.

This cycle brings life to the land.

[♪ gentle music playing]

[birds chirping]

[water rushing]

My grandparents thought glaciers would always be there.

I had thought this too.

But then one day in 2014, this is on the news.

[host] Ok Glacier was on a mountain in Western Iceland.

It was always known as Iceland's smallest glacier

but it will not be considered a glacier anymore

because glaciologist Oddur Sigurosson is on his way

up the mountain

to issue a death certificate for the glacier.

[Oddur] I put down the cause of death as extreme summer heat.

Ok Glacier was only about 700 years old at its demise.

That is to say, a mere infant among glaciers.

Around the year 1900 it was about 15 square kilometers.

But in the last 15 years,

it has shrunk faster than I imagined glaciers could shrink.

It has declined remarkably fast.

It doesn’t move anymore and that's why it is "dead ice."

[water trickling]

[Andri] I wonder if the death of a glacier will seem as

historic to you as it does to me.

[water trickling]

For me, this is when the horizon collapsed.

The future we were warned about is no longer distant;

it is here.

Time is running out.

The first time I felt this way, I picked up a camera.

And, without knowing it,

began making this time capsule for you.

It's 1997, my girlfriend Magga has just given birth to our

first child, Hlynur.

[Andri] This is Hlynur's first bath

with his mother.

Isn't this beautiful?

[Andri] At the same time, my other grandfather, Jon,

tells us he may be dying.

So we all come running to his seaside home.

[Andri] Here we have four generations lying on the grass.

The heirs to the throne.

The oldest man, with his oldest son, and his oldest son,

and his oldest son.

- The oldest of them all.

[Andri] Look how cool he is.

I'm not ready to say goodbye.

Earlier that summer, I take a job at the National Archives,

a place that preserves the oldest records in Iceland.

Each archive is a portal that sends me to another time.

I travel through the Eddas to 1220,

when our myths of gods and the cosmos are first transcribed.

The Book of Settlements takes me to 874,

when the first humans settled in Iceland.

Now, I'm in 1862, in a folktale about elves.

Here, an elf has lured a shepherd into her home

inside the rocks.

Then, I land in the living room of an old woman born in 1918.

She is singing one of the oldest art forms in Iceland,

song poems called rimur, the Icelandic word for rhyme.

[singing in foreign language]

[singing in foreign language]

[singing in foreign language]

[Andri] Rimur feels like such a discovery that I share it on TV.

- I had never heard anything like it.

But when I started listening carefully to the lyrics,

it contained such sorrow.

It was...

about the collapse of the old ways.

As I listened to the constant repetition and rhythm,

I became enchanted by it.

[Andri whistling Rimur tune]

[Andri] I play the recordings for my son when he gets fussy.

He calms down as soon as the melodies start up.

This old woman singing my son to sleep revives a world lost

to me, until now.

[Andri] We're filming him now, when he can't do anything,

and when he starts talking and being fun,

we won't take any photos of him at all.

But I'll always have this.

[overlapping chatter]

[Andri] I was never a proper nerd with a proper camera.

But thinking of Grandpa Jon's last summer,

I just grab what is handy and hit record.

- Andri, is there a zoom lens on that thing?

- Yeah.

- Are you sure? - Yeah.

[Andri] When you look back over the last 50 years...

what stands out?

[Jon] What?

It's how fun it is to make mistakes.

[Andri] It's fun to make mistakes? - Yeah.

That stands out.

That stands out? - Yeah.

And it never pays to save money.

- It never pays to save money.

No. - No.

[Andri] The more I film, the more I can hold on to

Grandpa's every word.

It's as if recording him can transport him into the future,

where I can meet him once again.

[Jon] It was the loveliest proposal and confession

I've ever heard from a woman.

[Disa] Is that so?

[Jon] No Icelandic woman has ever said anything half as beautiful.

[Andri] What did she say?

[Jon] You want to know what she said?

[Disa] That's a secret.

[Jon] The loveliest proposal I've ever heard.

It's a secret. - It's a secret.

[Jon] But we should definitely tell Andri.

[Disa] No!

[laughter]

[laughter]

[Andri] From this point forward,

I keep the camera rolling and record everything that I love.

[Andri] Everything's covered in flowers.

Petur Jonsson's gymnastics show.

That's Bosi, he's going swimming.

It's approaching midnight.

Grandma!

They're playing dodgeball.

A can of whipped cream.

The beautiful cake.

It's 11 o'clock.

Time for the boot toss.

Mmm, the steak is ready.

Hello Magga. - Hi.

[Andri] Hello Hlynur. - Hi.

How old are you now? - Four.

[Andri] How old are you, Hlynur?

[Hlynur] Five.

Six years old.

[Andri] Hey Kristín Lovisa.

Are you turning six months old?

Hulda Filippia,

are you one year old today?

Elin Freyja, how old are you?

- Two years old.

[Kristin] Now I am three.

[Andri] Have you gone nuts?

[Kristin] I am a wild child!

[Hlynur] I'm only one year old.

[Magga] Oh my, the tiny baby.

[Andri] Magga, look how young you are now.

Only 30 years old.

- Aw, 31.

[Andri] And how old am I?

[Hlynur] You're five years old!

[laughter]

[laughter]

[Andri] In our family, Grandpa Arni was our first archivist.

[♪ gentle music playing]

Through his records, I can step into his memories.

And so many of his memories transport me to the

place he loves most.

[Andri] You took such special photos on the glaciers.

[Arni] Yeah, I did...

[Andri] When I was a kid, Grandpa Arni would put on

slideshows and tell us tales of adventures.

Each photo jogs Arni's memory.

With this slide, he recalls Hulda's happiness as the ice

mingles with the clouds.

With this one, he remembers places waiting to be named.

The glacier plays tricks on his memory too.

"That's how it is on a glacier," Grandpa Arni says.

"You think you've walked this path before, but then,

all of a sudden, there's a crevice."

[slide projector clacking]

And every once in a while, a dahlia from his garden bursts

into the picture.

With this slide, Arni talks about a certain kind of peace.

All these years later,

I understand just what this peace means.

[Andri] What is your first memory?

[Arni] I actually remember quite well when my dad died.

[Andri] How old were you when he drowned?

[Arni] 12 years old.

It naturally...

was a very big shock.

[Andri] I always thought that this memory

pushed him away from the ocean and far uphill.

For Hulda, glaciers were a place of solace too.

[Hulda] First, I was...

engaged to another and had twins with him.

Two lovely girls.

He went to study in the United States.

And he found himself an American

and just broke up with me.

That was naturally a bit of a shock.

[Andri] She found strength in the sky and in the ice.

[♪ gentle music playing]

Grandpa Arni likens photography to glaciers;

they also record the passage of time.

Our glaciers contain:

a volcanic eruption from 1918,

another from 1983,

one from 2004,

and 2011.

Bubbles in the ice hold ancient air that tells stories

of seasons passed.

Their warmth, their cold, their precipitations,

their pollens, their pollutants.

My grandparents were some of the first to touch this

archive of deep time.

[host] Another milestone was reached in the research

of Vatnajokull Glacier.

[Hulda] They were drilling to reach the ice core down there.

I was an assistant...

There I am.

This was fantastic.

[host] Finally, an ice core has been obtained

containing valuable information

about the internal structure of temperate glaciers

and information on climate changes in Iceland

back to the year 1500.

[Arni] That was, and is, quite special.

[repeated tapping]

[Andri] Arni and Hulda would tell me that to hold an ice core

is to hold the Earth's memories in your hand.

[♪ ethereal music playing]

[♪ ethereal music playing]

[wind]

[overlapping chatter]

[Andri] Smile!

I'm making a video.

[Magni] Happy birthday, champ!

It's your birthday today.

That is why we sing a song.

on the same day

you were born

Congratulations on your lucky day, my lucky fellow.

[Andri] Grandpa Arni won't remember this party.

When I tell him he had a birthday, he says,

"How fun. How old am I now?"

[Andri] My Grandfather, do you remember the honeymoon?

[Arni] Do I remember-

[Andri] The honeymoon up on Vatnajokull?

[Arni] Oh no, I don't remember that.

[Hulda] It's ok, go ahead.

He has become so forgetful.

[Andri] He says it just happened one day, like a crack;

he couldn't remember a single detail.

[fireworks exploding]

[fireworks exploding]

[Andri] You have to kiss!

[Andri] Now I can't blink without a month passing me by.

[Andri] There you go!

Great! Great!

[Magga] How long did she practice? 15 minutes?

[Andri] 15 minutes. Oh, oh, oh...

[Andri] It's seven o'clock

and our thermometer shows...

[Magga] 36. (97F) - 36?

[Magga] The thermometer on the house is at 50 (122F).

[Andri] What country are we in?

[rushing water]

[wind]

[Andri] I thought I had more time.

There's so much I want to ask Arni,

and so much more I will never know.

[host] Beneath the Vatnajokull Glacier lies a

restless family of volcanos.

[eruption]

[Andri] Our unpredictable island holds many unknowns,

like when a volcano might erupt and unleash a glacial flood.

[host] We see the water from the glacier flowing down the slope.

A formidable force.

[Andri] We've always contended with the elements here,

and adjusted our lives around them.

[host] The flood tore massive icebergs from the glacier’s edge

and hurled them far across the sands.

Those standing here sense how small humankind is in

comparison to all of this.

[Andri] Reverence for these forces is embedded in

the stories of my grandparents.

Their tales reflect a way of seeing the world where

nature is alive...

...and full of mysteries.

[Hulda] Before we changed the landscape here,

there were these cliffs.

I saw Hidden People in the old days.

We once saw a Hidden Man suddenly appear...

and then disappear.

[Arni] He disappeared? - Yes.

[Jon] "I'm an elf woman," she says.

“Some of us live in cliffs..."

"while others live inside rocks."

She said,

“You can never fully see me"

"because it takes so much of my energy to appear to you.

"But if I draw more energy, I can speak to you."

"And even influence you."

- How are the new pants?

[Andri] They're nice pants. - I had them shortened.

[Andri] Yes.

[Disa] They were too long.

[Jon] I cannot resist the will of the elf woman.

She will keep appearing until I give in.

For example, she ordered me to marry Disa.

And I did it.

[Andri] So many of my grandparents' generation have

stories like this.

Each hillock has a legend.

Every river, a folktale.

Every glacier, a hidden world.

When I worked at the National Archives,

I found this recording,

a farmer telling a legend of a mythical forest inside the ice.

[Ragnar] Hundreds of years ago they found birch logs

at the edge of the glacier.

It's very strange.

I don't understand it, but I'm not saying it isn't true.

[Andri] For centuries, those living at the base of

Vatnajokull Glacier notice logs thawing from the ice.

This is a strange sight in our nearly treeless country,

sparking rumors of a forest inside the glacier.

A place that hides outlaws and trolls,

where time stands still.

But there is truth to this legend.

It's around the year 900.

Our first ancestors just arrived and encountered

trees growing here.

They name it Breioamork, the Wide Forest.

Over the years,

a glacial tongue flows down the mountain and freezes

the trees in time.

It's 2026 and that tongue is still here,

now called Breioamerkurjokull, the Wide Forest Glacier.

A name that ties this living ice back to the founding

of Iceland itself.

[♪ gentle music playing]

[♪ gentle music playing]

[thuds and ice shattering]

[host] A glaciologist expressed concern with the

retreat of Icelandic glaciers in recent decades.

He says the country will have no glaciers in 200 years,

possibly much sooner.

[Oddur] Such bad news is unprecedented in history.

And it constantly surprises us how it keeps receding

faster and faster.

This is the same phenomenon happening in Antarctica,

Greenland, the Himalayas and all areas with glaciers.

Iceland's glaciers are 1,000 years old now,

which in some sense means that

we lose 5 years of history every year.

[Andri] I struggle with the death of one glacier.

And here is the news, they all will be gone.

Glaciers are leaving geologic time.

Changes that once took hundreds,

thousands, even millions of years are now

unfolding in a single human lifetime.

[slide projector clacking]

[slide projector clacking]

Grandpa Arni has been spending his days photographing

flowers from his garden.

[slide projector clacking]

All he can really remember is that he loves Hulda.

[slide projector clacking]

[Hulda] There's a whole box there.

Let's see.

This is when we all went to the Highlands.

[Arni] Yes.

[Andri] He's been losing his balance,

so we move him to a care facility.

Upon one visit, I find him in front of the TV.

He asks me, "Why is the slideshow moving so fast?"

He slowly starts to fade away.

[♪ reflective music playing]

[♪ reflective music playing]

And then, he's gone.

[Andri] Tell me your name.

[Arni] Arni Kjartansson.

[Andri] When were you born?

[Arni] November 26th, 1922.

[Andri] And what day is today?

[Arni] It’s the 27th of March, 2004.

[Andri] We are collecting sources and biological samples

so you can be cloned in the 22nd century.

[Andri] All these years,

I thought my filming was a way to bottle each

and every moment.

But, really, I was just watching the past flicker

behind glass, noticing the effects of time on camera tape.

Now, I see it for what it was,

holding on to dear life as it charges forward,

trying to stop all that I loved from slipping away.

I see the impulse to hold on everywhere.

This is the Library of Water in western Iceland.

It stores melted ice from our glaciers.

[♪ futuristic music playing]

[♪ futuristic music playing]

Here is water from Poris Glacier.

Here is Snaefells Glacier.

And this one is Ok Glacier, collected just before it died.

Perhaps, in the form of water,

the ice could still travel through time.

It's the same water, after all.

As ice, it holds memories.

As liquid, does it lose them?

[lighthouse softly pulsates]

[water dripping]

[wind blows]

[ice and ash crumble]

[water dripping]

[water running]

[♪ emotional music playing]

I often think about the unsettling quiet of

a glacier's death.

It's like a summertime

that just came and stayed and stayed.

[water rushing]

[♪ pensive music playing]

[♪ pensive music playing]

[waves lap on the iceberg]

[air bubbles releasing]

[air bubbles releasing]

Will your oceans be made of our glaciers?

Your rain of our seas?

Your water is my water.

Your time, also mine.

In my family,

Grandpa Jon's horizon is his grandfather's horizon.

And his grandfather's before that.

[singing in foreign language]

[singing in foreign language]

[Andri] Here he is singing "Dreamland,"

an ode to the seaside plains where he made his home.

...there is the land of my dreams

[Andri] Jon's love for his home is intertwined with

the way he speaks about it.

He can transport me there with a single word.

I think of this one term he used...

...fuglabjarg, the Icelandic word for "bird cliff."

[loud squawking]

[loud squawking]

It also means "a noisy gathering."

He used it to describe my parents' wedding.

It was a total fuglabjarg in there.

You couldn't hear a single thing.

But the bird cliffs that Jon knew are no longer the

bird cliffs that I know.

[reporter] Seabirds are finding it hard to adapt

to climate change.

Recent figures indicate that the Icelandic puffin population

has declined by 70% since 1995.

Biologists say the main reason is the rise of

ocean temperature...

[waves lapping]

[Andri] Will this word for noise, for me,

now reference a silent place for you?

Maybe fuglabjarg will become kind of a ghost word,

where speaking it will elicit a memory of birds who

no longer exist.

I wonder about the name Iceland.

In 200 years,

will saying my country's name also summon a ghost?

[overlapping chatter]

[friend] Your dad is videoing you.

[Hulda] I know.

[friend] Why?

It's so special to see an 11-year-old girl eating cake.

And ice cream. - And ice cream.

What do you think about that?

[Andri] Shortly after Hulda's birthday in 2019,

I was asked to write something to memorialize the dead

Ok Glacier for its upcoming funeral.

The words would go on a copper plaque on

the mountain where the glacier once lived.

[interviewer] It's kind of a writer's dream,

and also a writer's nightmare.

You've got four lines.

How can you say something that's going to be meaningful?

- Yeah, and you're writing in copper.

So you don't have a easy delete button if you make a mistake.

It's like when you make a gravestone in a cemetery,

you, uh, somebody's gonna read it in

200, 300, 400, 500 years.

Copper lasts longer than stone, so maybe 6,000 years.

I'm not sure how to approach this.

[explosion]

Once I wrote about the destruction

of another landscape.

I called upon Icelanders to stop the construction of

a dam that would choke a glacial river.

But I never thought the source of the river itself could die.

And this time,

not because of a local power company,

but due to the world's hunger for power.

I have never written a memorial for a glacier.

No one has.

How do you say goodbye to what you never thought

you could lose?

When Grandpa Arni died,

I could not stop writing his obituary.

I had too many words.

I never felt closer to Arni.

And yet, he's gone.

I could see how saying goodbye could allow his memory

to live on.

Grandpa Arni lived a long life worthy of celebration.

But Ok Glacier's life was cut short by us;

there's no celebrating that.

How can I express the scale of this loss in a way

that reaches the future?

[waves crashing]

[♪ haunting music playing]

The death of Ok Glacier is not a single event.

It threatens the life of everything in our

interconnected world.

Our beaches, our forests,

our seasons, our loved ones.

Our language.

When upheaval happens on this scale,

only myths feel big enough to hold it.

In our mythology, the world is born in ice,

but ends in the ocean, by way of the sea monsters.

The Serpent of Midgard,

he is the ocean and the planet itself.

In the Eddas, Thor tries to conquer the serpent.

But just as he slays him, the serpent kills Thor.

The waters rise, and the serpent's venom

infects the seas.

Their mutual deaths trigger the death of all the gods,

and a total destruction of everything.

How can I tell the future the extent of what we have

lost if the future may not even exist?

[churning waves]

[wind gusting]

[overlapping chatter]

[fireworks exploding]

[Magni] Look at this here.

A little more.

No...

Leave it there!

When this light goes out,

then start it. Now you can start it.

[Coach] Clear the ball!

[Magni] Yes, well done.

[Coach] And forward, forward!

[applause and cheering]

[audio rewinding]

[Hulda singing in Icelandic]

[Andri] Let me send you this song,

a rima that can transport you through time.

Its patterns of rhyme helped people to remember long stories

before recording technology existed.

- There were women learning strange poems from

their grandmothers.

Who learned it from their grandmothers,

who in turn learned it from their grandmothers.

You can feel how time shrinks down to nothing

when you look at it through these old women.

[Hulda singing in Icelandic]

[Hulda singing in Icelandic]

[Andri] Rimur transmits our ancestral stories

across centuries, each verse a vessel for

keeping the past alive.

Maybe generational memory is the closest way that humans can

experience the depth of time.

Happy birthday Hulda Filippia

she has a birthday today.

Hi Grandma.

[Hulda] How was the wedding trip?

- It was incredibly fun

and challenging.

We experienced all kinds of weather on the glacier.

- Yes.

- We were there for three weeks.

- Three weeks?

- Yes, on the glacier.

- Wow.

That's a long time.

- It was a fun time.

[Andri] Can you ask her to calculate for you?

When she'll be 96 years old?

- Do you want to figure out

when you'll be 96 years old?

- Yes, yes.

[Andri] We forgot to turn on the camera there.

Now, let’s do it once again.

- Andri.

Should I say it?

- Yes, you should ask.

- When will you be 96 years old?

- 2104. - 104.

- Yes.

- It will be fun to know what will have happened by then.

- Yes.

[Andri] 2104.

Looking at it this way, a future beyond my own life is

beginning to come clear.

It's a place where my own daughter might

be a grandmother, and where my own grandmother's

memory can live on.

I can touch time,

stretching back to Grandma Hulda's birth in 1924,

all the way through 2104, where we may reach you.

It's like a handshake of generations.

That was one of the last times I filmed with Grandma Hulda.

Soon, she too would pass away.

It's a generational shift in my family.

But from time to time,

I can meet them all once again.

I can still revisit the way light reflects off

Grandpa Jon here.

And Arni.

And Disa.

[Andri] Hi Grandma.

[Jon] It's then that I realized,

it's the same with people as with flowers.

They wither into puffballs

and spread their seeds.

But from the root, new life grows.

[Andri] I didn't record much from their funerals,

only a couple of clips.

[Eilin] ...but I think it's good for me to see her like this.

[♪ somber music playing]

[waves lapping gently]

[Andri] What jacket are you wearing, Hlynur?

- Grandpa’s jacket.

[Andri] Yeah, nice.

[Hlynur] The jacket of the plains.

- Go!

[♪ reflective music playing]

[Andri] I want you to see how our lives move in rhymes.

Funerals live in sunsets.

Birthdays in sunrises.

Weddings live in fellow creatures.

Our summer migrations live in streams.

Harvests in the floodplains.

All this time, nature keeps records all around us.

In these cycles of time and water,

I feel a direct connection to all ancestors and

to all descendants.

But our time is unlike any time before.

[water trickling]

[wind]

[wind]

[rain falling]

[raindrops]

The singers of the swan songs are wrestled down by Time.

The new era erases the footsteps of our rhymes

The only way to keep the verses of the mother tongue alive...

...is to put this into the mouths of children

[Andri] Hlynur.

[Andri] This rima that lulled my son to sleep is an elegy,

a goodbye to the life the singer held dear.

She urges the listener to care for what still remains.

Her words of sorrow traveled into a future that, to her,

seemed foreclosed, but they still reached me.

[♪ somber music playing]

I had the honor to write the text on this plaque.

And it's a strange situation for a writer to write,

in copper, something that will outlast all paper.

It will even last longer than this stone.

This is pointing inwards,

and it's also pointing into the deep future.

And so, people come up here,

and they can look at the horizon.

But they will also look at the words,

which we ask here on this plate,

is that we acknowledge that we know what is happening.

And we know what needs to be done,

but only those that will read the words will know

if we actually stood up to that challenge that

we were given.

[♪ pensive music playing]

Standing in the place where the ice once was,

I look across the valley to the neighboring mountain.

A thick patch of ice, for now, still a glacier,

is moving slowly down the slope.

[Andri] Hey, what are you doing?

It’s out of focus. - I know, very out of focus.

Wasn't it supposed to be in focus?

It's not focusing.

[Andri] Before Hulda died,

my kids were becoming the camera people.

We helped Hulda in the garden many afternoons.

[Hlynur] Here it comes.

[Andri] What do you think about time?

[Hulda] Time? - Yes.

[Hulda] Time passes incredibly fast.

There's always plenty to do.

I never feel alone.

And I often just start talking...

I feel like he is sitting in the chair next to me.

We've had a very enjoyable life.

It's good to have the memories.

I start to smell the glacier in April

and I look forward to going.

But now it's been a long time since I went.

I would need to go up with a plane, I think.

[water rushing]

[♪ emotional music playing]

[Andri] I cannot send you a glacier,

but at least I can send you this:

A portal to a time when glaciers are still alive,

held open so they can continue to be.

I wish in some way I could know how you received it,

but only time will tell.

[singing rima in Icelandic]

[singing rima in Icelandic]

[singing rima in Icelandic]

[singing rima in Icelandic]

[singing rima in Icelandic]