The Mississippi River is more than 1,800 miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the two major bodies of water have both been misused as dumping grounds over the decades.
Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia will urge strong protection of both when she appears in Davenport Sunday, Jan. 25, during and after the 3 p.m. screening of the award-winning 2024 documentary, “Out of Plain Sight,” which was inspired by her uncompromising coverage of jaw-dropping pollution of the ocean just off the Los Angeles coast.
The 94-minute film is the second in the 2026 Quad Cities Environmental Film Series (which began Jan. 18), on Sundays through March 1 at St. Ambrose University’s Galvin Fine Arts Center, 2101 Gaines St., Davenport.
“This documentary project has been truly a labor of love,” Xia said in a recent phone interview. “And it has been such an unprecedented undertaking for the Los Angeles Times. We've never had a feature-length film where the reporter is also the director.”
The L.A. Times newsroom’s most ambitious film project yet, “Out of Plain Sight” follows Xia as she unravels a haunting tip from 2020 and discovers that as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean decades ago.
Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovered a corroded barrel on the sea floor 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.
She broke the story that the dumping of DDT (which had been banned in 1972) in barrels from the 1940s through ‘60s was “out of sight, out of mind,” but as one scientist had the prescience to say: “The problems we forget don’t just go away. They eventually come back to haunt us,” according to Xia’s film summary.
The first story featured the chilling image of the corroding barrel of toxic waste just sitting on the sea floor, “dumped decades ago and just still out there in the environment,” Xia said recently of the image captured by Professor David Valentine at the University of California-Santa Barbara with deep-sea robotics and technology from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
“They were doing research on something completely different. And they had just an extra day on the research vessel with all this amazing camera technology,” she recalled. “They were just scoping the sea floor, seeing what else is there, and they came across this barrel. And so that image was the first thing that landed in my inbox when Professor Valentine called me all those years ago with this tip being like, hey, this feels like something, you know, what are the questions we should be asking?
“Is there a story here? And from there, we do implement a lot of that raw footage into the film itself,” Xia said. “Also just thinking about the history of DDT and all the archival that exists on just the history and the story of the original forever chemical that prompted ‘Silent Spring’ and Rachel Carson's entire movement towards better environmental protection -- there was just like so much to work with.”
“What's really interesting about this film is, and I love that the Quad Cities Environmental Film Series is interested in this film as well. This is a film that is, yes, about one specific chemical that got dumped off of one part of the coast in the country into one part of the ocean,” Xia said. “But it truly is a proxy for all the other chemicals that we're putting into the environment -- past, present and into the future.
“And it's also representative of all the bodies of water that we do feel somewhat disconnected to, just because we do have such a land-centric way of thinking about our relationship to this planet,” she noted.
“My reporting has jolted Congress, inspired scientists and reignited a call to action that had been buried in the decades after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” she said of that seminal 1962 environmental science book.
But this story was begging to be told more visually – with a more profound exploration of how the horrors of our past continue to affect our future.
“So in an unprecedented partnership for the Los Angeles Times, I joined forces with director Daniel Straub and a small but mighty team with a track record of documenting issues with compassion and nuance,” Xia wrote. “We agreed to approach each filming day as journalism first, which allowed my reporting to open doors that would otherwise have been impossible.
“Most notably, to bring the audience to hard-to-reach spaces across the silos of science, we pared down the film crew to only three people: myself, Straub and our cinematographer, who doubled as our film editor,” she noted of Austin Straub, Daniel’s brother. “We transcended the conventional documentary approach by replacing the retrospective ‘sit-down interview’ with real-time discoveries that were captured at sea, in the lab, and during the process of my reporting. We spent entire weeks learning the rhythms of wildlife – and felt their suffering firsthand as we sought to give their lives meaning beyond death.
“The end result is a cinematic but also journalistically-precise documentary that immerses the audience in a world that I have spent years getting to know,” Xia wrote. “This film is a true extension of my journalism, rather than a recap of my journalism, and you can feel the trust with each source, as well as the humanity of every researcher and even the U.S. EPA. Sonically, we also found an extraordinary composer who braids together the interconnectedness of our marine ecosystem with a haunting score that feels as if the deep ocean itself is finally speaking.”
Part of a sprawling environmental team
A Tufts University grad, Xia joined the Times in 2010, and became one of several environmental reporters, each with a different focus. She’s been the coastal/ocean reporter since late 2017.
“The L.A. Times breaks up its environmental coverage in a pretty interesting way. We do it by landscape, which is not how a lot of the bigger newsrooms do it,” she said recently. “You could also say that it's also very California. So I cover coastal ocean. And then we have another reporter who covers water, and he's like, all the rivers and the lakes and the water supply. And we joke that all the water in California until it gets to the Pacific Ocean is his.”
Other reporters focus on air quality, wildfires, wildlife, deserts, energy and earthquakes.
Although DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was banned 50 years ago, its toxic — and insidious — legacy continues to haunt the marine ecosystem off the California coast, the Times says.
Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT once dumped its waste into the deep ocean near Catalina Island. This pollution bubbling 3,000 feet under the sea remained hidden until a new generation of scientists discovered the evidence.
Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds are still accumulating today in Southern California dolphins and California’s critically endangered condors, and a recent study linked the presence of the chemical to an aggressive cancer in sea lions. Another study based in Oakland found that DDT’s hormone-disrupting effects are affecting a new generation of women — passed down from mothers to daughters, and now granddaughters.
“In late 2020, I was overwhelmed by the number of filmmakers who reached out, called, wanted to somehow turn this article into a movie,” Xia said of her first expose about the ocean dumping. “And I said no to everyone and just kept doing the reporting. And then at one point my co-director Daniel Straub and his brother Austin Straub found me at a book talk (in early 2023) and they stuck around afterwards.”
“And their ask to me wasn't can we make a movie with you? It was -- can we follow you in the field the next time with a camera, the next time you go out into the field?” she recalled.
Xia’s 2023 book, “California Against the Sea,” is about sea level rise, which started with a 2019 series of articles that was recognized as a 2020 Pulitzer finalist for explanatory reporting.
Xia was among an L.A. Times team of three to be Pulitzer Prize finalists for explanatory reporting, for “a deeply researched examination of the difficult choices Californians must make as climate change erodes precious coastline.”
While the book didn’t lead directly to the documentary, the loose unifying thread between the two is that they both concern the Pacific Ocean, she noted.
Daniel Straub served as co-director of the film, and his brother Austin was the cinematographer, manning the camera.
“It clicked for me when I first met the two of them, when they came up to me at that book talk was just their attention to the details and the nuance and understanding that science and journalism is complicated and that the film was not able to tie the story up in a neat little bow,” Xia said.
“But I think the messiness of the story was what drew them to the story and that by leaning into the messiness, that in itself was the heart of the story,” she said, noting they’ve done previous docs on health and pollution topics.
“But I think just like their ability to really get the understanding of the process of science and that there was a patience involved in honoring kind of the truth-seeking process was what made me, I just had a feeling in my gut that this was the right team,” Xia said. “And I think our composer, James Ellington also really understood the spirit of what we were trying to do with this film.
“It was really cool to work with such a great film team that understood how to not just reach people's minds, but also their hearts with a story like this,” Xia said.
She initially didn’t even want to be on camera in the film, but “Daniel and Austin and James eventually basically staged a coup, saying that I needed to be in the film as, you know, the anchor for the audience and just the guide,” she said. “And to this day I still have to refer to myself in the third person.”
“It was very collaborative and I think of everyone co-directing, co-producing this because we were just, it was such a small team, but we all really understood the heart of what we were trying to do with this film,” Xia said.
Mobilizing many-pronged responses
Her DDT dumping stories mobilized an entire community of scientists, and drew the attention of the state, U.S. EPA and Congress.
“It really prompted these deeper philosophical questions too, about our relationship to the ocean,” Xia said. “The first story published in late 2020, and since then I've written more than a dozen follow-ups. And we've just learned that the first story was just the tip of the iceberg. And now that we know what questions we should be asking about what happened in the past, it's continued to unravel all these other pieces to the story, and the scope just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so the film kind of begins with that first article.”
“What's really special about the documentary is that it is documenting actively my journalism process as I'm doing all these follow-ups with the scientists who are also pursuing the next step questions.,” she said. “And you kind of learn and see how this story continues to evolve through the process of the documentary.”
What usually happens with a doc based on media stories, is a film team or studio gets interested, and the newsroom hands off the material and the film team makes the documentary, including interviews with reporters and their sources.
“And for us, because the story was still actively unfolding based on what the first article prompted, we ended up deciding to see if we could make the movie ourselves,” Xia said.
“We're just on this research vessel that first day together. And we just very quickly realized that there was a really important story to tell that could be cinematic, visual and just very all-encompassing,” she said. Daniel decided early on to ask her to co-direct the film, a task she’d never done before.
“And from there it was just Austin and Daniel continued to follow the journalism, follow the science as it actively unfolded,” Xia said. “I think that's been something that has also been really remarkable now that we're sharing the film to so many communities at so many different film festivals, is that this film is showing not the end result of journalism, but the process of journalism.
“I think in some ways that has really helped the audience have a deeper appreciation for the actual process that goes into truth-seeking through journalism and science,” she said. “And that has been something that has been very moving to me to see because, just at a time when there is so much distrust and misunderstanding in how journalism works and how science works, we've kind of started to see that this film has been taking this film to different communities and actually being there to be there for the conversation after the screening has been such a beautiful and powerful way to help rebuild connection and trust in the journalistic process and the scientific process.”
Series of festival triumphs
The film premiered at DOC NYC and continued its festival run at SLAMDANCE, where it was selected as the festival’s opening-night film, and at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where it sold out every screening and won the Audience Choice Award.
Out of Plain Sight also won the audience award at the Berkshire International Film Festival, and two major environmental film festivals awarded the film with their highest honors: The Shared Earth Foundation Award at the DC Environmental Film Festival and the Best Feature Film Award at the International Wildlife Film Festival, where the jury cited the film as “a gripping and urgent exposé that brings long-buried environmental crimes to the surface with cinematic precision and investigative depth.”
Xia has received many meaningful honors in environmental filmmaking, including the Jackson Wild Media Award for best investigative film, considered one of the highest honors in environmental filmmaking.
A November 2025 review in the L.A. Times called it a “fleet, urgent-sounding dispatch, centering on Xia herself as an intrepid factfinder roving the affected coastline…”
“Though we need movies that demystify journalism (and Xia is an appealing on-camera correspondent), that aspect is less interesting than the propulsive portrait of a dedicated, multi-pronged effort to expose, understand and hopefully clean up a still-viable threat,” the review said. “ ‘Out of Plain Sight’ doesn’t need to be earthshaking filmmaking to relay a valuable ongoing story about a hidden nightmare for all of us.”
Among the film’s many laurels, Scott Z. Burns, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, said: “Xia and Straub give new life to the lesson which has repeatedly been ignored in our culture: that everything is connected and nothing—definitely not the improper disposing of toxins— allows us to escape responsibility. OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT is haunting, enraging and a vital addition to environmental storytelling.”
Taylor Miller, director of Slamdance, has said the film “is haunting because it’s real—an unflinching exposé that demands we confront the truth when lives are at stake. This is the ethos of documentary filmmaking at its core: revealing what must be known, no matter how hidden. It’s a powder keg of truth, ensuring no dirty environmental secret stays buried and leaving us to think twice about the consequences of silence.”
The film opens with a Rachel Carson quote that grounded the filmmakers, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
“At least we now have a better shot at fully understanding how to move into the future now that we are unearthing so many forgotten chapters of our past,” Xia said. “And so the ending is messy, the story is messy, but I also think there is so much clarity that does come to light through the process of just being on the journey of trying to find answers to just such an overwhelming and massive problem.”
One of the screening highlights was last Nov. 1, when “Out of Plain Sight” had its San Francisco Bay Area premiere at The Redford Center, which was co-founded in 2005 by activists and filmmakers Robert Redford and James Redford, The Redford Center is a nonprofit that advances environmental solutions through the power of stories that move.
How to end the film
One of the most challenging aspects of making this documentary was figuring out how to end it right, Xia said.
“Because this ending is still yet to be determined based on the decisions that we choose to make or not make today as a collective society,” she said. “And I want to be mindful of not giving away too much of the story before folks are seeing the film. But I will just say, this film takes you through on a journey with me, prompted by that first L.A. Times article that helped so many people in the science and policy world realize what questions we needed to be asking.
“And ultimately this film is a film about the questions that we should be asking that we had forgotten to ask or never knew to ask. And by asking those questions, we have now expanded our understanding and knowledge of something that, you know, without this knowledge, we would not be able to move forward. And I think the film opens.”
Xia said theirs is a “haunting, overarching lesson from this film that has shook people every time they've watched it. It's just what we actually allowed to happen, permitted legal back in the day because of our apathy and our disconnect to the ocean and to so many parts of our environment,” she said.
“So kind of what are the steps that we can take today to remedy some of this? There are a lot, that there's a complicated and messy kind of aspect to that as well. But overall, I think people will be surprised by just how much we allowed to happen back in the day.”
“There is a saying in the film where the ocean, when you dump something into the ocean, it feels out of sight, out of mind,” Xia said. “The same could be said about the Mississippi River. And I just think there's this disconnect to all these different bodies of water in our world, in our communities, is what has allowed this practice to happen in the past for us to collectively forget about it and move on.”
April Kleckner, who works for the QC’s River Action and is on the film series committee, agrees that its lessons apply to the Mississippi River and her group’s focus on its protection and celebration.
“This film spoke to my heart,” Kleckner said Friday. “I thought it was a great opportunity to lift up investigative reporters, and how important they are, especially with environmental issues.”
Of Xia, she said: “She’s so gracious, we are so lucky to have her. She is delightful.”
“I just want to shout out the Quad Cities Environmental Film Series, and everyone on the committee,” Xia added. “They have been so engaged and so thoughtful in curating and bringing together the films that are in this season.
“The fact that they reached out and remained in touch, and were just so committed to bringing me and the film out to the Quad Cities community, it’s such a gift to have this film series in the community.”
The seventh-annual film series runs on Sundays through March 1, including a double feature on Feb. 15. For tickets, click HERE.
People today must channel anger and hope about climate change into courage and conversation, Xia noted.
“The emotion that I stay rooted in for my readers and for the viewer and also for myself as someone who is working on these issues day in and day out -- the emotion that I think is so important is courage,” she said. “Giving people the courage to care, to not look away and the courage to keep and just to remain engaged rather than to shut down or shut it out.
“And I think that sense of courage really starts with a sense of knowing and a sense of understanding and a sense of responsibility that now that you know this, there are ways to continue the conversation,” Xia said.
To see the film’s trailer, visit: www.outofplainsight.com/about#trailer
To follow the film’s most up-to-date festival screenings and announcements, please see the film’s official website and the film’s Instagram page.
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
