With offshore drilling resuming off the Santa Barbara coast by Sable Offshore Corp., the
Marjorie Luke Theatre’s Green Film Series will host the West Coast premiere of “The Cost of Silence,” nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

The event will be at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 14, at the Marjorie Luke, 721 E. Cota St., Santa Barbara.

The documentary exposes the concealment of a human health disaster following the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and how a cover-up allowed the same toxic response methods to be cemented into national spill response plans.

Today, the film reveals that every coastal community, including Santa Barbara, faces a largely unknown and potentially deadly threat.

“After covering the BP spill for over 15 years, and as a former oilfield worker, I feel a duty to tell this story,” Manning said. ‘My job is to inform and to provide a path to act. I trust people to make their own decisions, once they know what the true risks are.”

Following the screening, the event will offer a community forum designed to share the latest 
information and provide ways audiences can engage in the issue through the introduction of
 Engagestream, a custom-engineered action platform built to empower audiences to take immediate 
and sustained action on the issue.

Secretly filmed over 10 years by Mark Manning, oil industry insider-turned-filmmaker, reveals how government and industry coordinated to hide the toxic aftermath of the 2010 spill.

While the world moved on, tens of thousands of victims, clean-up workers, families, and coastal residents were left to suffer chronic illness, disability, and death. Fifteen years later, not one has had their day in court.