Lithium Ghosts

Directed & Produced by: Nicolas Muñoz

Stage:
- Development
Locations:
- Argentina,
- Chile,
- Bolivia
Updated: July 6, 2026
Project Type:
- Feature
Project Style:
- Hybrid
Theme Subject:

Logline

To power our smartphones and EVs, the 'green' lithium boom is stripping the Argentine Andes of its water and ancient cultures. Now, a dedicated biologist and local activists face a race against time to expose this devastating trade-off and stop the destruction before it's too late.

Clips

While the global transition to EVs promises to save the planet, lithium mining is draining the scarce water of the High Andes.

Synopsis

...

In the thin, freezing air of the Andean Puna, research biologist Dr. Enrique Derlindati tracks a rapidly collapsing water table through its most fragile casualties: the Andean flamingo. Driven by a relentless commitment to secure the definitive forensic evidence of the salt flats, Enrique operates as an environmental detective in a high-altitude wasteland. Yet, tied to an academic salary that fails to cover baseline living costs, he navigates a brutal systemic paradox. Starved of public funding, this university professor from Salta is forced to finance his independent research by moonlighting for the very multinational mining corporations draining the region’s aquifers.

Enrique’s investigation pushes him across the borders of the Lithium Triangle—from the evaporating salt flats of Argentina to the ghost communities of Bolivia’s dried Lake Poopó, and into the industrial scars of Chile’s Atacama Desert. Along the way, his journey intersects with grassroots activists and traditional Indigenous salt harvesters, like Ariel, who are watching their lands vanish into industrial mirages. Dismissed by corporate public relations, these frontline defenders desperately need Enrique’s independent data to quantify the true human and environmental cost of the "green revolution."

The film’s rising action embeds with Enrique’s team during an unprecedented field expedition—trapping flamingos to extract heavy-metal blood and tissue samples in a race against biological erasure. However, the narrative culminates off the salt flats. In a high-stakes convergence, Enrique hand-delivers the finalized laboratory results directly to a coalition of Indigenous leaders and grassroots defenders. This final act is not merely about pointing fingers; it equips a historically marginalized resistance with the indisputable scientific leverage needed to defend their ancestral water rights and shatter corporate narratives in the media.

Ultimately, the Andean flamingo is more than an ecological casualty—it is a living barometer. If the birds fade from the Altiplano, the vibrant, ancient cultures anchored to these wetlands will silently vanish with them.

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Background

...

STATEMENT
As an Argentine filmmaker, I watch my country continually trapped in a cycle of exporting its future to fuel the Global North. But when I began filming biologist Enrique Derlindati, I saw a reflection of my own deepest contradictions. He is a father fighting to protect his daughters' future, yet forced to fund his research through the very mining corporations draining the Andean salt flats.

I face the exact same bitter irony: to document the scars of the lithium rush, my cameras and drones rely on the very batteries driving the extraction. As modern consumers, we are all complicit in this absurd paradox.

Lithium Ghosts: (Pink Alert) is not a passive, observational film, nor a simplistic activist pamphlet. It is a direct confrontation with the true cultural cost of our "clean" energy transition. I want to prove that lasting resistance isn't built on hard data alone, but on visceral empathy.

My camera doesn't just document the damage—it is my tool to defend what remains.

ACCESS & METHODOLOGY
"Access is built on time, not just permits." Operating with a minimalist "Crew of One" footprint, we have cultivated profound, non-extractive trust with biologist Enrique Derlindati’s team and local Indigenous leaders. This radical intimacy grounds our cinematic approach, allowing the camera to act as an embedded witness rather than an intrusive spectacle.

AUDIENCE & DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY
We treat this project not just as a traditional documentary, but as an active transmedia ecosystem. To combat audience apathy, we bypass traditional gatekeepers by rolling out companion short-form native content across social platforms. This "Glocal" strategy builds a highly engaged, organic audience in the Global South first, creating the momentum needed to drive acquisitions with premium international platforms.

ACTIONABLE IMPACT

We are moving viewers from passive observation to visceral empathy, backed by tangible off-screen architecture:

Direct Legal Empowerment: The toxicological data gathered during our 2026 expedition will be handed directly to Indigenous leaders as actionable legal proof to challenge mining concessions and combat corporate misinformation.
Material Agency: Operating under a non-extractive framework, we grant Indigenous partners full institutional rights to the footage to drive their own conscious tourism initiatives.
Direct Revenue: Proceeds from the licensing and sale of our limited-edition exhibition prints will directly finance a community-managed cooperative fund.
Global Blueprint: This equitable co-creation model will anchor our digital impact campaign, uniting international scientific and creative sectors into actionable steps.

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Participants

Enrique Derlindati

Scientific Lead & Protagonist

Participant

Enrique Derlindati

Scientific Lead & Protagonist

Dr. Derlindati is a Professor of Conservation Biology at the National University of Salta and a member of the IUCN Flamingo Specialist Group. With over 30 years of fieldwork in the High Andes, he is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the Andean and Puna flamingos. His research, supported by organizations like WCS and BirdLife International, provides the critical ecological baseline to understand the impact of lithium extraction on wetlands. In Lithium Ghosts, Enrique acts not just as a consultant, but as the narrative guide—a "detective of the wild" racing to decode the language of the birds before their habitat is silenced forever.

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Ariel

ARIEL | The Salt Harvester

Participant

Ariel

ARIEL | The Salt Harvester

Ariel is a generational salt harvester in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, maintaining an ancestral trade that predates modern industry. Living on the edge of the great white desert with his wife, Vanesa, and their three children, he carves his livelihood manually from the earth.
For Ariel, the salar is not a resource, but a home. Witnessing the rapid encroachment of multinational lithium mining, he has become a quiet but firm voice of concern for his community. His struggle is intimate and existential: he fights to ensure that the water—and the future of his children—does not evaporate along with the lithium.

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Andean Communities

THE ANDEAN COMMUNITIES | Guardians of the Water

Participant

Andean Communities

THE ANDEAN COMMUNITIES | Guardians of the Water

Inhabiting the high-altitude deserts of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia for millennia, the Kolla and Atacama indigenous nations are not merely residents, but integral parts of the ecosystem. To them, the salt flats are living entities, and water is the sacred blood of the earth (Pachamama). Facing the rapid industrialization of their territories for the world’s "green transition," they stand as the frontline defenders of the Puna. Their resistance is not just political, but spiritual: a fight to ensure that the global rush for lithium does not erase their ancient past, nor the fragile biodiversity they have protected for centuries.

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Style & Tone

Lithium Ghosts is designed to make the audience feel the inescapable, suffocating reality of an impending ecological collapse. We aim to shatter the intellectual detachment of "climate fatigue" and replace it with raw, visceral empathy, forcing the viewer to feel the exact weight of what is being lost to power their "clean" energy future.

We achieve this psychological tone through a deliberate collision of two visual languages:

Embedded Vérité: Operating with a

...

We achieve this psychological tone through a deliberate collision of two visual languages:

Embedded Vérité: Operating with a minimalist footprint allows our camera to act as a non-extractive witness. By stripping away intrusive machinery, we capture the stark, haunting silence of the Andean Puna and build profound trust with frontline communities.

Poetic Interventions: We use this grounded documentary foundation to anchor staged, sensory metaphors. Where scientific data falls short, these visual disruptions translate invisible environmental trauma into immediate emotion, visualizing the exact moment industrial technology erases organic life:

The Digital Nest: A discarded smartphone in an abandoned flamingo nest emits a sharp digital chirp—a haunting sonic metaphor for the artificial noise replacing the wild.
The Displaced Bird: A ballet dancer in a fragile garment of pink feathers is systematically stripped bare by violent, high-altitude winds on the salt crust, viscerally mirroring the extinction of the Andean flamingo.

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Team

Nicolas Muñoz

Director & Producer

Team

Nicolas Muñoz

Director & Producer

Nicolás Muñoz Documentary Filmmaker & DOP | Buenos Aires, Argentina He studied photography and cinematography at ORT schools, later specializing in documentary filmmaking at INA (France), and honing his craft at UBA (Argentina) and Maine Media College (USA). At age 24, after graduating from film school, he began a 13-year career as a correspondent for Associated Press Television. Covering breaking news across Latin America and beyond, Muñoz reported from extraordinary places and captured urgent, human-centered stories. In 2014, with two young children, he made the difficult decision to leave the news world—stepping away from a stable path into one that was more uncertain, especially financially. He shifted his focus from news to longform documentary work, channeling his journalistic experience into a visual storytelling style that blends strong imagery, emotion, and narrative clarity—even in complex or sensitive environments. In 2018, he won Best Adventure Film at the Banff Film Festival in Canada. Since then, his work has continued to evolve across formats and platforms, earning recognition such as the Sony World Photography Award in 2024 and becoming a Sony Alpha Partner. Today, he collaborates with NGOs, broadcasters, and institutions to tell grounded, human-centered stories with lasting impact. His work explores the intersections of social justice, environmental crisis, and resilience. With a deeply personal approach and a collaborative mindset, Muñoz often works directly with communities to amplify their voices and build powerful narratives from the ground up.

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Juliette Igier

Field Producer & Investigative Journalist

Team

Juliette Igier

Field Producer & Investigative Journalist

A distinguished journalist and filmmaker with decades of experience covering social and environmental justice across Argentina and Latin America. Juliette has a proven track record of bringing complex, high-stakes investigations to international audiences. She previously work together with Nico Muñoz on the acclaimed documentary Orphans of Lake Poopó (Orphelins du lac Poopó) for ARTE France, a project that showcased her ability to blend rigorous journalism with compelling human narratives. With a deep-rooted understanding of the region’s socio-political landscape, Juliette provides critical investigative depth and a bridge to major European broadcasters for Lithium Ghosts.

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Diana Cervantes

Impact & Transmedia Producer

Team

Diana Cervantes

Impact & Transmedia Producer

Award-winning visual journalist (New York/New Mexico) specializing in science-based stories and interspecies relationships. Her work, recognized by the New Mexico Press Association, bridges the gap between hard data and storytelling. Diana will lead the Podcast component and scientific reportage.

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Madeline Finkel

Story Editor & Creative Consultant

Team

Madeline Finkel

Story Editor & Creative Consultant

I am a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York currently completing my MFA in Film at NYU Tisch. As a Fulbright scholar to Argentina in 2019, I directed my first documentary. My most recent work was recognized by the British Council for the Arts and One World Media which named her one of "14 filmmakers to watch." She has produced work for ARTEtv, NOWNESS, the Barbican Centre London, and others.

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Jean Garner

Executive Producer

Team

Jean Garner

Executive Producer

Jean is an Academy Award-nominated Executive Producer, Commissioning Editor, and seasoned journalist with over three decades of high-stakes international media experience. A winner of a Peabody Award, two International Emmys, and a Murrow Award, she brings world-class editorial oversight and global industry connectivity to Lithium Ghosts. She served for a decade as the Senior Executive Producer for Al Jazeera English’s flagship documentary strand, Witness, overseeing over 400 documentaries. Her Executive Producer credits include the Oscar-nominated documentary short Chau, Beyond the Lines and the Emmy-winning Witness series. Jean ensures the project meets the highest international editorial standards and distribution viability.

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Budget

This section includes information about this project.

Doc team story creative team producer producer film production director journey impact cinema award award. Team journey creative producer producer producer story cinema producer camera visual.

Rights

This section includes information about this project.

Director producer screenplay editing cinema story award cinema story. Narrative independent award editing film creative award editing impact visual visual journey award.

Stills

Our Ask

CODE PINK

The "Lithium Triangle" holds over 60% of the world's reserves-the essential mineral driving the Global North's "green transition." While the demand for electric vehicles surges, the ancestral wetlands of the South are being turned into a "Sacrifice Zone," exporting their water to power foreign grids.

WHY NOW?

This project operates on a strict biological countdown. Between October and December 2026, we have a fleeting, non-negotiable window to join Dr. Derlindati’s team as they extract the definitive toxicological evidence of this ecological collapse. We must be on the ground to capture this exact window before the flamingo nesting grounds—and the ancestral communities that rely on them—are irreparably erased. In our blind rush toward tomorrow, Lithium Ghosts is an urgent demand to look at what we are destroying today.

PROJECT STATUS & IMMEDIATE NEEDS

The Ask: We are seeking $30,000 USD in direct production funding to officially greenlight Principal Photography (Oct–Dec 2026).

Project development and extensive field scouting are already fully de-risked, backed by early-stage grants, personal equity, and an official in-kind equipment partnership with Sony Alpha.

Long-Term Strategy:
With the production baseline secured, we are actively taking meetings to secure:

International Co-Producers (to scale the transmedia and feature-length architecture).
Broadcast & Streaming Partners (for 2027 global distribution and pre-sales).

We are seeking:

Funding,
International Co-Production,
Broadcast Partner

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Lithium Ghosts

Logline

Clips

Participants

Enrique Derlindati

Enrique Derlindati

Ariel

Ariel

Andean Communities

Andean Communities

Team

Nicolas Muñoz

Nicolas Muñoz

Juliette Igier

Juliette Igier

Diana Cervantes

Diana Cervantes

Madeline Finkel

Madeline Finkel

Jean Garner

Jean Garner

Budget

Rights

Stills

Our Ask