The Sundance film festival kicked off its final edition on Thursday in Park City, the Utah ski enclave that has housed the independent film hub for more than four decades. Beginning in 2027, the festival will move to Boulder, Colorado, after a multi-year selection process that many assumed would end in Salt Lake City.
Utah’s largest city, a mere 30 miles from the festival center, has long hosted extra Sundance events and served as its transit center. It’s a rapidly growing metropolitan area, a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts, a major US city – and, according to a new documentary that opened this year’s festival, facing an imminent ecological crisis.
The Lake, directed by Abby Ellis, details the precipitous decline of the Great Salt Lake, an “environmental nuclear bomb” that threatens the health of the region’s 2.8 million residents. Scientists have warned that the lake, the largest saline lake in the western hemisphere, may fully disappear within a matter of years, leaving a region home to over more than 80% of the state’s population susceptible to toxic dust from the exposed lake bed, unless drastic action is taken to curb water diversion. The lake, often called “America’s Dead Sea” (though it is, in fact, four times larger than its counterpart in the Middle East), hit a record low in 2022, having lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area from excess diversion for agriculture and other water use.
To continue on such a path “is absolute insanity”, says Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University, in the film. “I don’t think people realize how close to the edge we are.”
The new film warns, in no uncertain terms, that going over the edge would spell catastrophe for the state’s public health, environment and economy.
Toxic dust clouds laden with mercury, arsenic and selenium from the desiccated lakebed would increase pollution for a city whose air quality is already worse than Los Angeles, provoking a respiratory and other cancer-related issues. Birdlife and recreation on the lake, already disappearing with its surface area – now less than 1,000 square miles, down from three times that in the 1980s – would vanish completely. The lake’s disappearance would inflict billions of dollars of economic damage on the region, imperil the lucrative extraction of minerals from the lakebed, and threaten ski conditions at the numerous resorts in the nearby mountains (including the slopes of Park City, looming over the film’s premiere).
Olof Wood walks across reef-like structures called microbialites, exposed by receding waters at the Great Salt Lake. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP
Three years ago, Abbott, along with more than 30 other scientists, co-authored a report warning that absent major intervention, the 11,000-year-old Great Salt Lake would disappear within five years. The film opens in that dire warning’s present – salt-streaked expanses of mud where there was once waist-deep water, parched graveyards of pelican carcasses where there were once thousand-strong colonies – and its aftermath, as advocates urge the Utah state government to attempt a “rescue without precedent”. No saline lake on Earth has been successfully restored from structural decline.
Abbott and fellow scientists point to three ominous comparisons for Utah’s famous inland sea: California’s Owens Lake, which became one of the worst sources of dust pollution in the US after its water sources were rerouted to Los Angeles a century prior; Iran’s Lake Urmia, which devolved from turquoise tourist destination to toxic, heat-magnifying salt bed in a less than five years; and chiefly the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, which stretched between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before Soviet irrigation projects starved it to death, leaving shattered local economies, ship graveyards, large areas of salted sand and numerous health problems in its dusty wake.
Accepting the dire significance of the Salt Lake data in the age of fake news is one matter; reaching consensus on what to do about it is another. The film traces different approaches to governance and advocacy – most rooted, as with many issues in Mormon-majority Utah, in religious faith. Abbott, microbiologist Bonnie Baxter and atmospheric scientist Kevin Perry – all intimately familiar with the collapsing ecosystem and the toxic dust bowl taking its place – call for a radical overhaul of the state’s water use, which diverts more than 80% of the lake’s natural inflow to agriculture, primarily for water-intensive crops such as alfalfa and hay; state officials such as Brian Steed, appointed by the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, as the first Great Salt Lake commissioner, pursues a more moderate approach, seeking compromise with farmers whose livelihoods depend on water access in the nation’s second-driest state, and who feel as though they’ve become the scapegoat for the lake’s decline.
A still from The Lake by Abby Ellis, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance festival. Photograph: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Steed’s office makes incremental process on money to buy water back from farmers, yet the changes required to save the lake are so massive, and the straits so dire, that, as Abbott tells him, “winning slowly is losing”.
The documentary, which recently picked up Leonardo DiCaprio as an executive producer, includes footage from a roundtable with legislators, researchers and advocates, convened by governor Cox last September, that publicly prioritized restoration of the lake and dedicated $200m of philanthropic funds to the cause. A new charter set 2034 – the same year Salt Lake will once again host the Winter Olympics – as the target date for “reaching healthier lake levels and showcasing Utah’s pioneer spirit on a global stage”.
In the meantime, the Great Salt Lake, and the many whose lives revolve around it, remain in a precarious position. The Sundance film festival may be leaving Utah (at least, for 10 years), but The Lake maintains a hopeful eye on the region’s future, should the charter’s proposals continue as planned. Saving the Great Salt Lake “is not an impossible order”, Steed says. “This is not something that we have to sit around and puzzle about. We have an opportunity in front of us.”