Sundance film festival: A cautionary new film, executive-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, warns of the devastating consequences if the Utah lake continues to disappear
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he 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.
