Utah filmmaker Abby Ellis premiered “The Lake” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The documentary examines the environmental decline of the Great Salt Lake and the people fighting to reverse it.
“The film is about an environmental nuclear bomb here in Utah, known as the Great Salt Lake, which is drying up, and the lakebed is full of toxic materials, such as arsenic and lead, and other material that we don't even, that we don't even know yet,” Ellis said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour,” Wednesday. “The film follows a handful of people from science to politics working to not only better understand this crisis, but also how they can stop it before it takes off.”
Monday’s screening will be the film’s first public showing since its Sundance debut. Ellis says one of the biggest lessons she learned while making the documentary is that this crisis is human-caused and can be reversed if leaders choose to act.
“It's exacerbated by climate change,” she said. “But the number one driver for this is human consumption and mismanagement of this precious resource. Agriculture uses a significant amount of water, municipalities use a significant amount of water, as well as industries across the state. It 's not that their water use has increased necessarily, though some buckets of that have, it's more just that we've been using significant water that otherwise would get to the lake. We've been diverting it for our own use for so long that it's having a pretty dramatic impact.”
Ellis says the film is already helping generate momentum for conservation efforts.
“We are seeing significant dollars get raised for lake conservation, which is really exciting, and I think the population is starting to get a bit more engaged on the issue as well.”
The screening is set for Monday at 7 p.m. at the Park City Eccles Center. It will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and those working to save the Great Salt Lake, including the nonprofit Grow the Flow, which wants to turn the decline of the Western Hemisphere’s largest saline lake into a success story.
Ellis says two additional screenings are set for July in both Salt Lake City and Park City.
