In the Dark of the Valley

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.

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the previous reviewers to update their reviews so as not to discourage people from watching the film based on out-of-date information.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

I am a believer in space being important to our future, and have always been a big NASA supporter. I was shocked and dumbfounded to see all of the "slimy" things that the aerospace companies, AND NASA, had undertaken to continuously avoid doing what was right, not only to properly provide the appropriate monetary support to the families impacted by their negligent behavior, but even worse, all the political "crap" that the (involved) aerospace companies, and NASA, have engaged in order to try to continuously avoid any responsibility for cleaning up the radiation mess that still exists in this area of California, to this day.

Everyone should see this film. The corporate and government malfeasance demonstrated by all of the parties involved will dumbfound you.

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 would have been a powerful documentary if only fully watchable, since a good portion of the interviews and presentations are muffled and barely audible, thanks to a hugely irritating loud music which drowned the most important parts.

Over 60 years after the Rocketdyne nuclear leak, a large portion of the NW San Fernando Valley area, about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, remains radioactive. The massive 2018 Woolsey fire only further contaminated the grounds, and spread out nuclear compounds and harmful chemicals. The clusters of rare cancers have been documented - in October 2006, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory Panel, made up of independent scientists and researchers from around the United States, concluded that based on available data and computer models, contamination at the facility resulted in an estimated 260 cancer related deaths.

The site's owner, the Boeing company, as well as NASA and several of the state's and federal regulatory agencies keep avoiding the responsibility, and are proposing only a partial cleanup which would leave about 84% of the ground contamination still present.