How a Bolivian woman revives a dying lake with plants

(Bloomberg) — Lake Uru Uru in Bolivia’s mountainous west has nourished people for generations with its pristine water and abundant fish and birds.

Then, starting in the 1990s, mining and plastic and waste from the nearby town of Oruro filled Uru Uru with toxic contamination by the time a young woman reaches her 20s.

What is the young woman to do?

If it’s Dayana Blanco Quiroga, you have a simple plan and a lot of work ahead of you. An Aymara indigenous woman co-founded a movement in 2019 – Team Uru Uru – to clean the lake by hand.

The documentary How to Plant a Lake wraps Blanco and the community’s formidable challenge into a brisk arc. The film, directed by Satomi Blair and CG Foisy, is the winner of the 2026 Bloomberg Green Docs competition, which earned its creators a $25,000 grand prize, announced Friday at the DOC NYC Film Festival.

Within ten minutes, the documentary takes on a grand scale—a near-depleted, 83-square-mile toxic lake at 12,000 feet above sea level; blackened water and fields of garbage; the centuries-old history of the people living nearby and the never-ending task of the Uru Uru team.

The independent filmmaking duo behind it drew on their eclectic backgrounds — visual art, experimental theater and moral philosophy.

Blair and Foisy run 4Hawk Productions, a company they created to find and tell these stories. They traveled to Bolivia last year and met with Blanco and her team in collaboration with The World Around, a non-profit organization that promotes sustainable architecture and design.

The film opens with a 35-second low-flying drone shot over a vast, blighted and desolate basin. The images are overdubbed with the sound of Blanca panting as she drives a shovel into the ground to dig up the dried mud plants and transplant them into the polluted areas where the basin still has water. There, they are placed on hand-made frames and remove heavy metals and foul-smelling poisons from the water. The plants themselves contain the contamination – and must be enclosed to prevent animals from eating them.

In addition to pollution, the lake has faced other pressures, including droughts associated with El Niño and climate change that nearly dried it up a decade ago.

“If tomorrow we have to tell them what happened to the water,” says Blanco Quiroga, referring to future generations, “at least we will be able to say that we fought for our lake.

How to Plant a Lake breaks down Blanco’s journey into eight steps. These range from digging to organizing, purchasing hazardous equipment, floating root supports, and the key to the business—planting abundant totora, a reed-like mud plant that pulls pollutants from the water as it grows.

Another crucial step: recruiting allies like Sebastian Acampante, an Argentinian designer and curator, who is here to advise the mentoring program.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve faced such a deep, intimidating, profound silence,” he says, struggling to comprehend the devastation before him.

Directors Blair and Foisy, a married couple, complement each other. Foisy’s background in music and sound allowed him to record the calls of flamingos left in Lake Uru Uru and create music from them through a synthesizer. With his theater background, Blair ensures that every word and image serves as a film.

“Satomi is so story-driven,” says Foisy. “He can find a story in everything.

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