Daniel Straub (director, producer), Rosanna Xia (director, producer), Austin Straub (cinematographer, producer, editor) | 2024 | 94 min.
2026 Official Selection
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.
Rosanna Xia is an author, documentary filmmaker and environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for her reporting on sea level rise, and her celebrated book, "California Against the Sea," received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a gold medal from the California Book Awards, and a Great Reads from Great Places citation from the Library of Congress, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her coverage of a toxic dumpsite in the deep ocean has been anthologized in the "Best American Science and Nature Writing" series.
Her most recent project, the feature documentary "Out of Plain Sight" that she directed and produced, is a cinematic expansion of one of Xia’s most haunting environmental exposés. The film has won numerous film festival honors, including the audience awards at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Berkshire International Film Festival, and the Jackson Wild Media Award for best investigative film.
