In the Dark of the Valley

Several reviews mention issues with the sound mix which were all due to a technical problem during the initial broadcast on MSNBC. The film is now available to stream on Peacock and it looks and sounds great. The music is beautiful and the dialog is clearly audible. Go watch it!

Also, I'd encourage the previous reviewers to update their reviews so as not to discourage people from watching the film based on out-of-date information.

This documentary won multiple awards at film festivals and was nominated for an Emmy. It needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible to get the information out there!

In the Dark of the Valley is an extraordinarily powerful and moving film that follows the story of Melissa Bumstead, a mother whose search for answers about her young daughter's cancer leads her to the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site near Los Angeles. After meeting numerous other families impacted by pediatric cancer who live near SSFL, Melissa enters into a fraught world of polluter and government lies, negligence, and collusion, but summons the courage to organize her community to join the decades-long fight for the site to be fully cleaned up. I have been part of that fight for 15 years and was astonished by the way the film captures the heart of one of the longest and most intensely fought battles to clean up a contaminated site in the US.

Re other reviews, please know that sound issues were a one-time error on the network's part that have been corrected and are not present in any online format. The film won Best Documentary at the Phoenix Film Festival, Catalina Film Festival, and Ojai Film Festival, where it also won the People's Choice award, the first time in the festival's history that a film has won both awards. It also won Best Documentary, Best Directing, and Best Editing at the Angeles Documentaries.

Sadly a documentary, no matter how good, will almost never have the impact on society that a "major motion picture" can have if it has major starring actors. Perhaps some movie studio will have the guts to give it a go. I doubt it. To many powerful people they would upset is my guess. As with any locations where highly radioactive material is used and stored there is always a danger of leakage, whether by accident or other means such as terrorism or even malicious employees. One only has to look at the current event in Europe to see the dangers. And yet people are hoodwinked into believing that nuclear material is safe and humans can store the waste material safely for hundreds of thousands of years. Not likely.

This was a fascinating expose of unchecked nuclear power failures and the dangers to which we may all be exposed one day.

The only problem with this documentary is that throughout most of the film, the overdubbed music was so loud it was distracting and completely unnecessary.

This is well worth seeing. It shows how a group of "cancer mothers" focuses attention-and blame for their children's illnesses and deaths-on the contaminated grounds and groundwater of the former Rocketdyne site just outside of Los Angeles.

My only issue, and it's a big one, is that the voices in nearly every "talking head" section are drowned out by the loud original music. I lost so much information I really wanted to hear.