Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

A documentary featuring the on-going effects of the dumping of the insecticide DDT off the Los Angeles coast more than 40 years ago, to this day and beyond. 

The use of insecticides on crops consumed by the common person is a hot-button topic and has been for several decades. But did you know, as the film begins with much older videos and photographs of the common American getting absolutely doused in DDT, that back during the Vietnam war, it was decided the best way to combat the insect population and the spread of diseases like typhus and malaria, was to just envelope both military and civilians in DDT. The film shows children, pregnant women, civilians and military alike, all happily taking part in a “forever chemical” that their government told them was perfectly safe, and it’s kind of terrifying to watch. 

Moving ahead to the present, filmmaker and LA Times journalist Rosanna Xia begins with David Valentine aboard one of the most advanced research sea vessels to date, discovering a corroded barrel on the sea floor off the coast of southern California. The barrel, and it’s not the only one either, is leaking toxic waste into the ocean, affecting oceanic life in the form of entire now-cancerous seal populations, which in turn affects the avian population, which in another turn, affects the human population. We’re all connected, right? What we humans have done in the past returns to haunt us in the most distressing ways possible. 

Rosanna Xia, with the help of other compassionate scientists, doctors, researchers and investigators, discovers a shameful secret hidden in the depths of the ocean – in the years after WWII, more than half a million barrels of toxic waste were dumped into the ocean off the California coast, and just left there to rot. And we’re not talking about the now well-known Palos Verde Shelf scandal, the historic site of toxic-waste dumping of DDT and other noxious chemicals off the California coast, no, this is an entirely different scandal in a separate location. 

Xia goes on to speak with other researchers of the new site of corroded barrels of DDT and other chemicals, and her mounting frustration is clear through the unflinching eye of the camera following her. Much as she, and we, would like to discover a clear villain of this whole mess and put them up on sacrificial slab so that we would have someone on whom to vent our rage at this chaos, it turns out to just not be that simple. The company most directly responsible for the dumping of these barrels into the ocean floor doesn’t exist anymore, and they covered their tracks in paper trails pretty well before disappearing like an evil magician. The scientists and caretakers of the affected seal population, and we are treated to an entirely poignant scene where a seal too far gone to do anything more than put her down gently is euthanized and her corpse used for important scientific research, are understandably enraged, but there is little they can do. Researchers are carefully putting together sophisticated machines to go to these terrifying ocean depths and take soil and tiny-creature-life samples to bring back for study, but this takes time and funding they just in general don’t have. As Xia goes about gathering information from various scientific types, the answer she is most commonly greeted with is, they just don’t know enough about what’s actually going on down there with the corroded barrels on the ocean floor. And while everyone, perhaps most especially the official government environmental regulator types Xia interviews, are very careful not to try and lay blame on any one individual or company or regulation, it’s easy to come to an unsettling conclusion all the same – we, humanity at large that is, are all to blame. 

Xia interviews several folk who have a history of cancers and other diseases potentially caused by DDT exposure going back generations, and they speak of how their families are affected even to this day. Again the question of blame is skirted around, but the literal sins of our fathers are visited upon the heads of their children, as the film shows us in unflinching raw realism. 

For a good strong dose of the real-life horrors humanity visits upon itself and takes almost no responsibility for, a documentary made with love and terror in saddening equal measures, give Out Of Plain Sight a watch.