People die, glaciers die, here’s some more footage of my family. Perhaps if I’d been less tired, I might have sunk into Sara Dosa’s cyclical story of climate change and the inevitability of loss.

Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason began rather obsessively filming his family back in 1997 when he had his first child. This includes footage of his rather fascinating grandparents Árni and Hulda. They met on a glacier and honeymooned on a glacier, and seem to embody an Icelandic love of mountains and ice and gardens and stories.

The film is hung around the first death of a glacier, the OK glacier that is relatively young, only 700 years old, and the smallest glacier in Iceland. It has been officially declared dead as, after shrinking in size for many years, it is no longer moving. Magnason is given the job of creating the four lines that will be etched in copper and placed on a rock where the glacier was, to send a message forward through hundreds of years.

The documentary seems to cycle around and around, children, grandparents, glaciers, change, children, grandparents and so on. There is some beautiful imagery, particularly the ferocious weather over the ice, the cacophony of sound of the sea birds on cliffs, air bubbles and water through ice. There are some beautiful Icelandic songs, stories of trolls and elves, and of forests within the glacier.

After a while though, I was wondering what was actually being said other than the obvious. Yes we lose people and yes we are losing glaciers and this may mean an uninhabitable world in the future. Perhaps the point is that those in Iceland are seeing it at the front line, and this is a message being sent out to the world and to the people of the future.

I had high hopes as Dosa also made the magnificent Fire of Love (2022). I began to wish that I’d stayed in bed and got a few extra hours sleep, thinking about where I might get lunch after this and whether I had left it too late to see the puffin colonies that are now disappearing.

And I might not have been alone in being a little bit underwhelmed by those four lines he creates for the copper plaque.