THE EMPTY RESERVOIRS

Bulgaria's water crisis is not only a story about drought. It is a story about what remains when the water disappears.

Across Bulgaria, reservoirs built to secure water for cities, agriculture and energy are becoming landscapes of absence. Where there were once lakes, there are exposed shorelines, cracked earth, abandoned infrastructure and traces of places that water was supposed to hide.

The drought is real. Climate change is making periods of heat and water scarcity more frequent and more severe. But drought alone does not explain the crisis.

Bulgaria's water infrastructure is old, fragmented and heavily neglected. Thousands of kilometres of pipes have passed their useful life, enormous quantities of treated water are lost before reaching consumers, and hundreds of dams have been identified as requiring repair or reconstruction. At the same time, the institutions responsible for water are divided between ministries, municipalities, state companies and other authorities.

And behind the physical landscape is another landscape: money, contracts and responsibility.

Hundreds of millions of leva have been allocated for dam repairs. Some contracts were terminated. Questions have been raised about the way public money was distributed, the use of direct contracts and the effectiveness of the repairs. European investigators have also examined suspected fraud in EU-funded water infrastructure projects.

This documentary does not attempt to reduce Bulgaria's water crisis to a single cause. Instead, it asks a more uncomfortable question:

How much of a water crisis is caused by nature — and how much is created by the way we manage what nature gives us?

Through photographs, film, maps, archival material and documented water-level data, The Empty Reservoirs follows the changing landscapes of Bulgaria's dams and the communities that depend on them.

The exposed bottom of a reservoir is more than a landscape.

It is evidence.

Evidence of drought.
Evidence of an aging infrastructure.
Evidence of political decisions.
Evidence of money spent and promises made.
And evidence of how vulnerable a society becomes when a resource as fundamental as water is treated as someone else's responsibility.

The water may return. The question is whether the system will change with it.