“Out of Plain Sight" at St. Ambrose University -- January 25.
Sunday, January 25, 3 p.m.
St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, 2101 North Gaines Street, Davenport IA
Lauded by Screen Zealots as "a cinematic wake-up call" and by Beyond the Cinemadome as "investigative documentary journalism at its finest and most urgent," Out of Plain Sight serves as the second presentation in 2026 QC Environmental Film Series hosted by River Action. Screening at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center on January 25, the 94-minute 2024 documentary inspired An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z. Burns to deem the film "haunting, enraging, and a vital addition to environmental storytelling."
A work by Los Angeles Times journalist 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 after he called Xia, who pieced 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.
Co-directed by Xia and Daniel Straub, Out of Plain Sight won the Audience Choice Award at the 40th Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February 15, 2025. It also received the Shared Earth Foundation Award at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington D.C.; the Best Feature award at the International Wildlife Film Festival; the Special Jury Award for Environmental Justice at Mendocino Film Festival; and the Audience Award and an Honorable Mention from the jury at Berkshire International Film Festival. Out of Plain Sight was also awarded the Director's Choice Award for Fortitude in Filmmaking at the Woods Hole Film Festival, and was a finalist for two Jackson Wild Media Awards in both the Investigative and Science & Nature categories, winning the Investigative category.
Xia is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her journalism has inspired new laws and regulations, and her celebrated book, California Against the Sea, received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, an American Book Award and a gold medal from the California Book Awards, 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 co-director and co-producer Daniel Straub is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who has worked in the documentary industry for more than 10 years. With a sharp eye for stories that give form to environmental racism, injustice in the healthcare system and other insidious issues, Straub has dedicated his career to using film and television as vehicles for revealing systemic problems in order to drive change.
Out of Plain Sight will be shown in Davenport at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center on January 25, with the 3 p.m. screening preceded by the 2 p.m. Enviro Connect featuring exhibits and networking opportunities, and followed by a Reflection Speaker discussion with the film's directory and Los Angeles Times investigative journalist Xia. Admission is $10 with students admitted free with ID, and a 2026 QC Environmental Film Series season pass is available for $40-45. For more information and tickets, call River Action at (563)322-2926 and visit QCEnvironmentalFilmSeries.org.
