Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox looked down the barrel of the lens as he directly addressed the public via whichever news channel aired his speech in June 2021. The state was experiencing a historic drought, and he was using his platform to ask for citizens of all faiths to … pray for rain.
When this particular news clip played in my screening of the documentary The Lake in Salt Lake City’s Rose Wagner theater, the entire audience laughed. It was a bad joke they had heard one too many times before, and it wasn’t funny the first time.
The titular lake is, in fact, the Great Salt Lake, after which the Utah state capital city is named. It is around 10,000 to 11,000 years old and is a smaller version of the ancient Lake Bonneville. It has no outlet, so minerals have accumulated in its waters for generations; a saline inland sea.
How many years will it take for this majestic, storied lake to dry up? Less than five years, if there aren’t drastic conservation efforts.
No wonder documentary filmmaker Abby Ellis took a keen interest in producing a documentary about this catastrophe. She is a graduate-now-lecturer of the University of Utah’s film school, and the Great Salt Lake is in her backyard. The Lake is playing in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival 2026 at the right time. After 40+ years, the festival is relocating to Boulder, Colorado.
The Lake opens much like a narrative film. Visually pleasing low light, minimal dialogue, and ethereal music. Microbiologist Dr Bonnie Baxter hops into a small aircraft with a pilot, and they ascend over the lake. ‘This should be lake right here, Andy,’ she says as a textured, pale, dusty landscape fills the screen.
Ellis shoots most of the movie in close-ups and shallow focus, obscuring faces and centering in on part of the picture. There are no talking heads, and many shots are captured from across, or even outside rooms where the subjects are.
‘I wanted it to feel more cinematic than most environmental films,’ she said during the Q&A after the screening. It was also a pretty fly-on-the-wall operation. Her name appears multiple times throughout the credits as producer, cinematographer, editor, and production sound. Not due to a lack of funds per se, but because the nature of the documentary meant her crew had to be ready to go as soon as there was another development.
Her handheld cameras linger on shots of dead birds strewn and decomposing across the lake’s beaches (I can vouch, this is 100% accurate). She bookends her shots with carefully selected B-roll: birds flying overhead when the birds – particularly the Wilson’s phalarope – are becoming extinct. Ticking clocks, water flowing freely, extreme close-ups of the hands that hold all the power.
Rounding out the cast of recurring characters alongside Baxter is Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed and global ecologist Dr Ben Abbott. One works for the government, one is a scientist, but they are both devout members of the LDS church. Whereas Abbott seems to be willing to save the lake (or “Grow the Flow”, a non-profit organization where he is the executive director) by any means necessary, Steed wants to save the lake without rocking the boats floating atop.
The desire to save the lake is complicated by multiple opinions on how to achieve it (a tale as old as time). This is something Ellis was keen to highlight in The Lake. Naturally, those in the agricultural industry who use most of Utah’s precious water had their own opinions – along the lines of ‘Would you rather have food or a lake?’ or if God wanted to save the lake, he would.
Faith was an important issue in Ellis’ documentary, even if she didn’t know she would feature faith topics before shooting. 40-50% of Utah is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so if anyone was going to show them the importance of saving the Great Salt Lake, their reasoning would likely have to include Heavenly Father. Brian Steed put it best, in my opinion, when he said he doesn’t expect God to clean up the silly mistakes of humans.
As the story of this “environmental nuclear bomb” unfolds, Ellis features increasingly wider shots of the Great Salt Lake but is careful not to portray its awe. Yes, it’s measuring approximately 888 to 950 square miles today, but this is far below the recent averages of 1,700 square miles. Heartwarming scenes of Abbott playing with his young children and reading them a bedtime story about the Great Salt Lake, and activists in bird costumes singing ‘Oh when the waves come waving in’ to the tune of ‘Oh When The Saints Go Marching In’, offer much-needed respite.
I saw the film one day after its premiere. Whereas most of the audience members watching that screening in Park City would be out-of-towners removed from the documentary’s issues, the people watching my screening in Salt Lake City the next day were locals, like me. When the scientists in The Lake spoke of the lakebed’s heavy metal content filling the air with toxic dust clouds that harm the 2-3 million living downwind of the lake, they were speaking directly to us.
Unlike many environmental documentaries that end with a ‘people need to step up and do something’ call-to-action, The Lake‘s is slightly more hopeful. On 24 September 2025, Utah leaders signed the Great Salt Lake 2034 Charter. They announced $200 million in private commitments to restore and protect the lake.
If I were a pessimist, I would say that the fact that the money is coming from private partnerships is a cop out. Plus, the 2034 date is clearly a target that aligns with the Winter Olympics. If you were the state Governor, would you want the world’s media to highlight that you didn’t save the city’s namesake lake, when you could have?
But I’m an optimist. It’s not enough money, but it’s a start. Ellis’ movie – like the Great Salt Lake funding – has arrived just in the nick of time. Thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company executive producing, I hope the viewership of this expertly balanced film extends beyond the lake’s backyard, and it’s the first, but not the last, saline lake saved due to public action.
If you’d like to find out more about saving the Great Salt Lake, visit Grow the Flow.
