Out of Plain Sight

Opening Night Film, 2025 Slamdance Film Festival
Audience Choice Award, 2025 Santa Barbara International Film Festival

A scattered graveyard of corroded barrels is discovered across the deep ocean floor a short ten miles off the Los Angeles coast, well beyond the infamous chemical disposal sink now known as the Palos Verdes Shelf Superfund Site. The signs point once again to Montrose Chemical Corporation, an EPA Superfund Site itself and once the largest producer of DDT until 1982, 20 long years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Like Carson, Pulitzer Prize-finalist and Los Angeles Times journalist Rosanna Xia resolutely ties together a collaborative investigation expressly for the public eye. From the front-page exposés comes the thoroughly Southern California documentary OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT, which fully and exigently understands itself as a partnership with us, the audience, and acknowledges that this is just the next chapter of a story that will not go away. With co-director Daniel Straub, Xia stirs the waters of an ill-contained societal past, a cinematic invitation to open our eyes to what we were never supposed to see.

–Cheyenne Paiva

Supported by the San Diego State University School of Public Health and the SDSU APIDA Center