SYNOPSIS

In a not too distant future wracked by ecological devastation, a young boy grows up on an isolated lake. Though not yet destroyed by fire, the land he lives on and the lake at its center are slowly dying. As the boy wanders, drawing pictures of the dead animals and decaying landscape, refugees of all sorts start to pour in. Unable to rouse his despondent and abusive father, the boy takes matters into his own hands helping an old woman who is dying of thirst, and hiding from a strange animal-like man that would do him harm until all boils over and chaotic violence consumes the life he knows and casts him to the wind.

"WELL SHOT, WELL ACTED, AND SCARY. 
CAN’T WAIT TO SEE WHAT COMES NEXT."

­­Sean S. Cunningham, Creator of Friday The 13th

ABOUT THE FILM

A Lake of Ashes is a sci-fi thriller born out of bearing witness to our changing world, when James moved West he was taken aback by the beauty of the land and soon after shocked by the level of ecological turmoil the region already experiences. As the fires, droughts, and storms consistently worsened past the predictions of experts a whole world took shape in the filmmaker’s mind. If we’re already here... where will we be in a few decades?

Rather than a world shaken by a singular catastrophe like nuclear war, the film depicts a world that has experienced a long slow fall from grace reaching critical-mass. Labor capacity falling with the unbearable heat and an aging population leading to broken infrastructure, people draining from new rural ghost towns to the buckling cities, a green revolution that only made it halfway and left us stranded and hamstrung with technology going backwards, overflowing refugee camps, and more. All equals a reverse Oregon Trail where hopeless people flee East in ever-increasing numbers searching for any type of safety while opportunistic brigands prey upon them in the new lawless West.

A Lake of Ashes is a small sliver of this world, a boy and his father living on a lake poisoned by bacterial blooms caused by the changing climate and evaporating into nothing. The world of the film shows the uneven distribution of this perilous future as the land it is centered on is not yet dead but instead persists in a patchwork waiting for its luck to run out. People who don’t have their own places to hide meander across the land in search of sanctuary, but instead only signal the forward march of destruction.

The film was shot in real wilderness areas under threat of fire and drought, a lake that is really drying, and land in danger of burning with smoke visible on the horizon during production; all to depict the beauty and danger with images you can believe and a story that reflects the emerging new world we are all headed towards.