About the Event

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. This searing 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.

Following the screening, the event will feature a community forum with the filmmakers, and frontline community organizations 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.

The Cost of Silence

“Revealing, thoroughly-researched, and enraging.” – Variety

Upcoming Events:

The Cost of Silence: Community Action Forum & Film Screening

Sunday, September 14, 2025, at 4:00 PM

Learn more

The Santa Barbara Connection: Today, Santa Barbara faces a pivotal moment in its decades-long fight to protect its coastline, as Sable Offshore Corp. pushes to restart oil production from the Santa Ynez Unit — including the pipeline that ruptured in the 2015 Refugio oil spill. The restart has triggered multiple legal battles over permit transfers, safety waivers, and the lack of full environmental review.

While the public debate has centered on worker safety, environmental oversight, and regulatory compliance, one critical danger remains under-reported: the immediate and long-term health risks to communities and first responders from toxic spill response operations. These risks and consequences were systematically hidden in the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and remain hidden from communities across the globe.

The Cost of Silence is the only film to expose the full scope of this public health threat, the coordinated effort to cover it up, and the immediate danger to all coastal communities. What followed the BP oil spill wasn’t just a failure to protect the public, it was the quiet construction of a global strategy: a system designed to shield polluters from accountability by suppressing evidence, manipulating science, and blocking victims’ access to health care and legal remedies. Now, that system is embedded in the national response plan for all spills. As the Trump administration rolls back oversight measures and reopens all U.S. waters to offshore drilling, every coastal community, including Santa Barbara, faces a dire yet invisible threat: dangerous procedures approved without research into long-term health consequences.