Out of Plain Sight

Post-screening conversation with UCLA English Professor Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA Design Media Arts Professor Rebeca Méndez, and the film’s co-director, investigative journalist Rosanna Xia.

Co-presented with the UCLA Department of Media Arts and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

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 discovers 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.

2024, Dir. Daniel Straub, Rosanna Xia, DCP, color, 94 min.

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