About The Film
Secretly filmed over nine years, an oil industry insider exposes the devastating consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill and uncovers a public health disaster and the coordination between government and industry to silence the victims.
“A heart-wrenching plea for help. An infuriating warning sign. An inspiring call to action. ”
Synopsis
The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 was the world’s worst offshore oil drilling accident in history. The resulting oil spill contaminated 68,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico and threatened the lives of six million people. To make the oil go away, toxic chemicals called 'dispersants' were sprayed in unprecedented amounts. In the months and years after the disaster, the world has been led to believe that the 'clean-up' was a success, the dispersants were harmless, and life is back to normal. An oil field insider knew the official story was suspect and began to investigate. What he finds is a far different story.
From BP employees to clean-up volunteers to coastal residents and even innocent vacationers, Gulf Coast families and communities of all ages, races, and classes are suffering chronic illness, cancer, and premature death at rates far above national averages. The common link among the victims: all were exposed to oil and dispersants.
Whistleblowers describe aerial spraying of dispersants not just offshore, but actually over crowded beaches and even over inland communities. Leading toxicology and medical experts explain how dispersants make their way into the environment and human bodies, wreaking havoc. Uncovered government documents reveal that the toxicity of the chemical dispersant was known before use, and studies show that the oil industry’s only ‘clean-up’ tool for oil disasters creates a substance 52 times more toxic than oil alone. Interviews with high-ranking BP and government insiders expose how the spill response was driven by profit and public relations concerns at the expense of public health. This cooperation between industry and government created and then concealed a massive human health crisis. The spraying of dispersants continues to this day.
The cover-up has been successful, and a dangerous precedent has been set for the use of toxic dispersants in all future oil spills: ports around the world are stocked and pre-approved for deployment. Hiding this catastrophe paved the way for the 2018 Trump administration’s announcement of the largest offshore oil development plan in fossil fuel history. Implementation of that plan began in early 2019.
The first and only independent film to dive deep into the health repercussions from the Gulf oil disaster, the filmmakers have an outreach plan supported by leading NGO's with over 15 million members.
Team
Mark Manning
Director, Producer, Executive Producer
Mark Manning is an entrepreneur and award-winning documentary director of internationally acclaimed films, including The Road to Fallujah and The Cost of Silence. He is Founder and CEO of OURVOICE Inc., a media and technology company designed to create positive social change. He is also the Founder and President of ConceptionMedia Films, a documentary film production and issue campaign company. Mark is a former offshore oilfield diver and was a co-founder of an international relief agency specializing in humanitarian relief missions in combat zones. Additionally, he is the founder and director of the Clinton Global University Project Dialogues for Peace, an education and relationship-building initiative between university students in Iraq and the United States.
Langdon Page
Producer, Editor
Born and raised in Colorado, Langdon has produced and edited documentaries and features in Rome, Cairo, New York, Los Angeles, and Chile, including Oliver Stone's Persona Non Grata, Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks and Mary, winner of the Venice Film Festival Special Jury Prize, and Discovery's Peabody Award-winning Black Sky: The Race for Space. For HBO, his credits include Greg Barker's The Final Year and Koran by Heart, as well as Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's Liberty, Mother of Exiles, and Best Documentary Emmy-nominee Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. His producing credits include the 2013 documentary Salinger. Langdon's films have played at the Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Tribeca, Sundance, and other film festivals, in churches, mosques, schools, and theaters worldwide, and for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. He is the founder of Monkey Puzzle Media, a global film production company based in Santiago, Chile.
Reuben Aaronson
Producer, Cinematographer
Oscar-nominated, multi-Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Reuben Aaronson is well known for capturing compelling honesty and beauty. His long career often focuses on humanity and subjects largely ignored by the world.
Aaronson, a bilingual American-born filmmaker, raised in the heart of politically-driven Washington, D.C., has the gift for combining unguarded human moments with beautiful imagery to make great storytelling to be found throughout his long and short format work. Aaronson is the Founder of NGO Films, a company dedicated to creating content and media to advance awareness of human rights and the need for social justice
Mark Monroe
Writer
Mark Monroe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose career in storytelling spans two decades. His extensive writing and producing credits include films at Sundance every year for the last 10 years.
His writing credits include BAFTA, DGA and Academy Award-nominated Icarus; The Cove, Academy Award-winner for Best Documentary Feature; Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before The Flood, Steven Spielberg’s Finding Oscar; Grammy and BAFTA nominated The Beatles: Eight Days A Week; and Ron Howard's Pavarotti. A journalism graduate from the University of Oklahoma, Monroe began his career as a writer for CNN in Atlanta. Before writing theatrical documentaries, he produced more than 200 hours of biography-style television.
Jeff Sagansky
Executive Producer
Jeff Sagansky is a long-time investor, executive, and producer in the media business. Over the past six years, Sagansky and his partner Harry Sloan have founded five special purpose acquisition companies, which acquired and took public companies including Target Hospitality, Williams Scotsman and Videocon DTH, and India’s fastest-growing direct to home pay TV provider. He is the former President of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the former President of CBS Entertainment. He is the former CEO of TriStar Pictures where he developed hit movies including Steel Magnolias, Look Who’s Talking, and Glory. Sagansky also founded Hemisphere Capital to fund tentpole movies including Smurfs, World War Z, and Men In Black: International. Sagansky has produced documentaries including TWA Flight 800, and the feature film Remember. Most recently he produced the award winning Delhi Crime, a series for Netflix about the true story of a rape in New Delhi that started the victim’s rights movement in India.
Lauren Saffa
Editor
Lauren Saffa is a documentary film editor/producer with a passion for social justice and storytelling. She recently cut the ESPN 30 for 30 short Blackfeet Boxing about Native American girls learning boxing in self-defense. She is currently working on a new Netflix music series and is in development on a Netflix feature about women's skateboarding in the 2020 Olympics. Other editing credits include Do You Trust This Computer, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week (Dir. Ron Howard), and Hooligan Sparrow (Sundance Film Festival, 2016). Lauren cut the narrative short Tinto (TriBeCa Film Festival, 2014). She co-produced and edited the feature documentary Another World about the Occupy Wall Street movement with Director Fisher Stevens (Berlin International Film Festival, 2014).
Claude Chalhoub
Composer, Violin, Viola, Synthesizers
A fluent classical musician, Claude Chalhoub has served as concertmaster of maestro Barenboim’s ‘West-Eastern Divan’ Orchestra. His debut release on Warner’s Teldec produced by Michael Brook in 2000 was a success. Diwan is the second album released by Herzog records, in collaboration with the Gewandhaus Orchester of Leipzig, Germany. As a film composer in 2019, Claude composed the film score for The Cost of Silence directed by Mark Manning, and Johannes Kepler – der Himmelsstuermer directed by Christian Twente. Other films he composed the score for include HBO’s documentary Koran by Heart directed by Greg Baker, Persona non Grata directed by Oliver Stone. Claude’s music was used on numerous films including Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn, Germany’s ZDF TV series Kommissar und das Meer, Yes by Sally Potter, and Anwesend/Abwesend, a short film by artist Freda Heyden. Claude lives in Vienna, Austria.
Brian Hutchings
Colorist
With over 30 years of perfecting his craft, and four Oscar-nominated films including the 2014 Oscar-winning Twenty Feet From Stardom on his CV, Brian is comfortable in any genre. Although best known for color grading documentaries, he has color graded one of the Oscar opening segments with Billy Crystal, to 12 seasons of Project Runway for the Lifetime Network, and the first 8 seasons of the animated series King Of The Hill.
Allison Brownmoore
Motion Graphics Design Director
Allison Brownmoore is a BAFTA-nominated Design Director. She is co-founder of Blue Spill, an award-winning boutique design studio based in Soho, London, specializing in titles, film/TV design, and creative visual effects. In 2019 she was nominated for a BAFTA Craft Award for Title Design and SXSW Excellence in Title Design Film Award. She won the Broadcast Tech Award for Best Title Sequence and was also a judge for 2019 D&AD Awards in the VFX category. In 2018 she was a judge in the film category of the inaugural Motionographer Awards. In 2017 she was listed as Art of The Title’s top ten Women in Title Design, was a panelist for Women in VFX event at The Mill, and was also a participant in Animated Women’s Achieve Programme. In 2016 she won the SXSW Excellence in Title Design Audience Award and was a juror for the Titles and Graphic Identity BAFTA Craft Awards.
Derek Vanderhorst
Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer
Motion Picture Academy member and industry veteran Derek Vanderhorst founded Summit Post in 2004. With over two decades of experience, Derek has worked on over 130 feature films, episodic television, games and new media, including in-house roles at Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Brothers. In his various roles, Derek saw the need to evolve the post-production sound industry to better support the emerging trends and technology in filmmaking. Derek founded Summit Post to offer more flexible and customized options for directors and producers working on independent and major feature films who were seeking deeper partnerships and more freedom in the process. Derek’s passion around the complexity of sound began in 1975 when he learned to hand make a Rabab (a Persian lute-like musical instrument) with his grandfather in Aurora, Colorado.