“Environmental Nuclear Bomb”: A Documentary Examining the Fight to Save the Great Salt Lake | Sundance 2026

TThe Sundance Film Festival kicked off its final session Thursday in Park City, the Utah ski area that has been home to the Independent Film Center for more than four decades. Starting 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, just 30 miles from the festival’s center, has long hosted additional Sundance events and served as a transit hub for them. It’s a fast-growing metropolitan area, a destination for outdoor enthusiasts, and a major American city — and, according to a new documentary that opened this year’s festival, facing an impending environmental crisis.

“The Lake,” directed by Abby Ellis, details the severe deterioration 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 salt lake in the Western Hemisphere, could disappear entirely within years, leaving the region home to more than 80% of the state’s population vulnerable to toxic dust from the exposed lake bed, unless drastic action is taken to limit water diversion. The lake, often called “America’s Dead Sea” (although it is actually four times larger than its Middle Eastern counterpart), hit a record low in 2022, having lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area due to excessive diversion for agriculture and other water uses.

Continuing on such a path “is absolute madness,” Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University, says in the film. “I don’t think people realize how close we are to the edge.”

The new film warns, in no uncertain terms, that going over the edge will spell disaster for the state’s public health, environment, and economy.

Toxic dust clouds laden with mercury, arsenic and selenium rising from the dry lake bed would increase pollution in a city whose air quality is already worse than Los Angeles, leading to respiratory problems and other problems linked to cancer. The lake’s birdlife and recreation, already disappearing by its surface area — now less than 1,000 square miles, down from three times what it was in the 1980s — will disappear entirely. The lake’s disappearance would inflict billions of dollars in economic damage on the region, jeopardize lucrative mineral extraction from the lake’s bottom, and threaten ski conditions at several resorts in the nearby mountains (including the slopes of Park City, which loom over the film’s premiere).

Three years ago, Abbott, with more than three dozen other scientists, co-authored a report warning that the 11,000-year-old Great Salt Lake would disappear within five years absent major intervention. The film begins in the present of that dire warning — expanses of salt-strewn mud where water was once waist-deep, dry graveyards of swan carcasses where thousand-strong colonies once existed — and its aftermath, as advocates urge Utah’s state government to attempt an “unprecedented rescue.” No salt lake on Earth has been successfully restored from structural deterioration.

Abbott and his fellow scientists point to three ominous comparisons to Utah’s famous inland sea: Owens Lake in California, which became one of the worst sources of dust pollution in the United States after its water sources were diverted to Los Angeles a century ago; Lake Urmia in Iran, which transformed from a turquoise tourist destination into a toxic, heat-amplifying salt bed in less than five years; Chief among them is 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 behind shattered local economies, ship graveyards, vast expanses of salted sand and a host of health problems.

It is one thing to accept the critical importance of the Salt Lake data in the age of fake news; Reaching a consensus on what to do about it is another matter. The film traces different approaches to governance and advocacy – most of which are rooted in religious faith, as is the case with many issues in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah. Abbott, microbiologist Bonnie Baxter, and atmospheric scientist Kevin Berry—all intimately familiar with the collapsing ecosystem and the toxic dust bowl it replaces—are calling for a radical overhaul of the state’s water use, which diverts more than 80% of the lake’s natural flow to agriculture, primarily to water-intensive crops like alfalfa and hay; State officials like Brian Stead, appointed by the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, as the Great Salt Lake’s first commissioner, are taking a more moderate approach, seeking compromise with farmers whose livelihoods depend on access to water in the nation’s second-driest state, and who feel as if they are being made scapegoats for the lake’s decline.

Steed’s office is in a piecemeal process of getting money to buy back water from farmers, yet the changes needed to save the lake are so vast, and the straits so dire, that, as Abbott tells him, “to win slowly is to lose.”

The documentary, which recently tapped Leonardo DiCaprio as executive producer, includes footage from a roundtable with lawmakers, researchers and advocates that Gov. Cox held last September, which publicly prioritized lake restoration and allocated $200 million in philanthropic funds to the cause. A new charter sets 2034 — the same year Salt Lake City will host the Winter Olympics again — as the target date to “reach healthier lake levels and demonstrate Utah’s pioneering spirit on the world stage.”

Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake, and many of the people whose lives revolve around it, remain in a precarious situation. The Sundance Film Festival may be leaving Utah (at least for 10 years), but The Lake maintains an eye for hope for the region’s future, if charter proposals go ahead as planned. Saving the Great Salt Lake “is not impossible,” Stead says. “This is not something we have to sit around and wonder about. We have an opportunity in front of us.”