Larry Delrose lives 75 feet from the ocean. He watches from home as the water taints from sewage and the beach empties, and still, nothing changes.
“It breaks my heart,” he said. “And it’s up to us to do something.”
And he is. Through the cinematic documentary The Big Dump: Our Pacific Ocean in Crisis, which he executive produced alongside producers Brett Davis and Sara Morga, and director Allen Carrasco.
The film will premiere at the Coronado Island Film Festival, which runs from Nov. 8 to 12.
“After continuing to see this over all these years and watching our beautiful beaches close and people getting sick, I knew we needed to get a story out about this,” said Davis, who owns a business on Orange Ave. He knew Delrose would make the perfect partner, but it took some convincing.
“I’m Mr. Entertainment,” said Delrose, who produces a radio show with Davis. “I sing, I make people happy. I didn’t want to come out as an angry person. But I couldn’t take it anymore.”
And that, the two said, is the point. The documentary is not meant to be incendiary, but it is meant to educate and inspire action. By telling the story of the sewage crisis that has plagued San Diego for decades, the team hopes the message will spread, and something will change.
Waiting for an impact-focused film to premiere is brutal, though, when every day 35 million gallons of sewage is dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Each day that passes without repairs to the failing infrastructure on both sides of the border that caused the crisis prolongs its impact.
So, in the meantime, Delrose and Davis are tackling the issue in other ways. They’ll host advanced screenings of The Big Dump to any environmental groups, philanthropists, or other parties who may be able to help incite change. Currently, they’re working to schedule a showing for San Diego County mayors.
They also hope to set up screenings at local elementary schools in hopes that students will write letters to California Governor Gavin Newsom, asking him to declare the sewage crisis an emergency. San Diego County politicians have been calling on the governor to do so since declaring their own state of emergency in June.
And, the team supports 2024 Mexican presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmentalist who contributed to the Nobel-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We want to see a state of emergency declared,” Davis said. “We don’t want to hear that this is going to take another 10 years to fix. It’s a ticking time bomb that’s only going to get worse if it’s not taken care of.”
The premiere’s screening time has not yet been released; check for updates on the CIFF website. To inquire about a private screening of the documentary, contact Davis at The Big Dump’s website.
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