Out of Plain Sight
2025 | Coast Film & Music Festival
Duration: 94 min
Synopisis
From the Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Rosanna Xia, OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT is a cinematic exposé of an environmental disaster lurking just off the coast of Southern California.
Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovered a corroded barrel on the seafloor that gave him chills. The full environmental horror sharpens into greater clarity once he calls Xia, who pieces together a shocking revelation: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean – and the consequences continue to haunt the world today.
Featured at Coast Film & Music Festival 2025
Production Team
ROSANNA XIA is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her journalism has inspired new laws and regulations, and her celebrated book, "California Against the Sea," received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a gold medal from the California Book Awards, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
DANIEL STRAUB is a Los Angeles based director and producer who has worked in documentary for more than 10 years. With a sharp eye for stories that give form to environmental racism, injustice in the healthcare system and other insidious issues, Straub has dedicated his career to using film and television as a vehicle for driving systemic change.