The film shows a group of young people "bathing" at the titular lake or lagoon, and includes "views of Baralt Plaza, the main market, and, in general, the central belt of the city".

The group collected frames from the 1890s stored in the Zulia Photographic Archive, restoring and colorizing the images to recreate the approximate look of the films.

[3][4] Less than six months after Venezuela saw the arrival of the first Vitascope, Venezuelan film as a national industry began on 28 January 1897 at exactly 7:00 pm,[2]:9 with the screening of two films produced in the country—Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el gran Hotel Europa and Muchachos bañándose en la laguna de Maracaibo.

The other, shown last of the four, was L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat; both French films were by the Lumière brothers and, according to Peter Rist, were projected in Maracaibo by Gabriel Veyre.

The reviewer noted the running of the tapes was initially irregular, and the lighting of the theatre was too bright to show films, making it hard to see images.

To support the opinion he was not the director, there is evidence that Trujillo probably did not have a motion picture camera with which to make the film, and was in Táchira at the time.

[11]:54 Those who feel Trujillo could be the director rely on his proximity to film at its inception in Venezuela and his relationship with American camera companies.

[19] In 2018, historians Jesús Ángel Semprún Parra and Luis Guillermo Hernández [es] suggested that Veyre, the French camera operator and filmmaker, was more likely to be the director.

She also says that Muchachos bañándose... together with Un célebre especialista... are one of two factors leading to the development of a narrative approach in Venezuelan cinema—the other was the working partnership of Carlos Ruiz Chapellín and W.O.