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A documentary centered on a small Mississippi River parish had been racking up awards, earning prizes at film festivals in San Francisco, London and Milan.
But when residents of St. John the Baptist Parish tried to screen “The Big Sea” at a publicly owned theater during Black History Month, Parish President Jaclyn Hotard intervened, shutting down the event without explanation.
Organizers and legal experts say the cancellation in late February was discriminatory and appeared intended to silence viewpoints critical of St. John’s large petrochemical industry.
Produced by British filmmakers, the documentary explores the link between the global surfing industry and air pollution in Reserve, a mostly poor, Black community in St. John. Until its closure last year, the Denka chemical plant between Reserve and LaPlace was the nation’s only producer of chloroprene, a key ingredient used to make neoprene for wetsuits worn by surfers worldwide.
“The Big Sea” takes aim at Denka, a company that federal regulators said posed a substantial cancer risk to St. John residents, and the wider industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — an area known as Cancer Alley.
“This is important stuff for us to get to the public,” said Robert Taylor, president of Concerned Citizens of St. John, a community group that organized the screening at the St. John Theatre, a parish-owned theater in Reserve. “But the power of the petrochemical industry runs deep in Louisiana.”
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Hotard has previously tussled with community groups over industrial projects. In 2024, court filings revealed she had used violent language against activists opposing a now-defunct grain terminal project. Evidence shown in federal court also showed her family stood to make money from a land deal related to the project, which would have been built atop the graves of enslaved people. Last year, a jury cleared Hotard of allegations that she had restricted the speech of environmental justice activists during parish meetings.
Tulane University law professor Bruce Hamilton, who directs the school’s First Amendment Clinic, said Hotard’s cancellation of the documentary screening is “very clearly a First Amendment violation.”
“The St. John Theatre is a public forum,” he added. “Because the parish government allows other uses, they can’t discriminate against this documentary in particular.”
The 95-year-old former movie house was purchased and renovated by St. John Parish in 1980. Run by a nonprofit group that leases it from the parish, the theater is regularly rented out for community events.
Members of Concerned Citizens say they booked the theater in December and received assurances from the theater’s manager, Amy Wombles, that the screening was approved by the venue’s board. Concerned Citizens secured insurance and were finalizing food-service plans for the screening when Wombles abruptly announced the show was canceled.
“We regret that we must inform you that Parish President Jaclyn Hotard has vetoed the screening of The Big Sea documentary at St. John Theatre,” Wombles wrote in an email on Jan. 23. “The Parish President and the Sheriff have the authority to close any event at St. John Theatre for a variety of reasons.”
Sixteen weeks later, no reason has been given, Taylor said.
“We’d done a lot of work putting it together,” he said. “But after they’d given us access, they canceled. And we still don’t know why.”
Hotard and Wombles did not respond to requests for comment.
First elected parish president in 2019, Hotard was a strong supporter of Denka, praising its contributions to the local economy, which she estimated last year contributed about 250 jobs and $2 million in annual sales tax revenue.
She blamed the plant’s closure on federal regulators and legal actions backed by environmental activists.
“I believe some of the pressures placed on this facility were particularly aggressive, and at times lacked the balance needed to account for economic and workforce reality,” she told WVUE-TV last year.
‘We’re certainly thinking about litigation’
In 2023, President Joe Biden’s administration sued Denka, alleging that the plant posed “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare.” The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said the company hadn’t moved fast enough to reduce emissions that posed cancer risks and imperiled children. An elementary school, which has also closed, was a half-mile from the plant.
President Donald Trump’s administration dropped the lawsuit early last year, but the plant was already shutting down. In May 2025, Denka suspended production, citing toughening regulations and a “slowdown” in global demand for neoprene.
“The Big Sea” premiered last year amid the tumult. It quickly racked up more than a dozen awards at several film festivals and attracted coverage in Vogue, Surfer Magazine and The Guardian.
The 75-minute documentary was filmed in California, Spain, Australia and other regions where surfing is popular, but its core narrative is rooted in St. John, a parish of about 40,000 people that straddles the Mississippi about 20 miles west of New Orleans. St. John was once dominated by plantations but its farm fields have mostly given way to industrial facilities. After Denka’s closure, the parish still has 10 facilities that the EPA says release large amounts of toxic chemicals.
“They’d shown the documentary all over the world, but it needed to be shown here because it’s about us,” Taylor said. “And we wanted to show it in the only theater in the dog-gone parish.”
The theater advertises itself as a venue for school plays, dance recitals and beauty pageants. Its schedule of events is fairly light. In May, for instance, the only performances the theater’s website is promoting are a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band and a play based on the Disney movie “Aladdin.”
“The theater doesn’t have that much going on, so they can’t say they were too busy,” Taylor said.
Concerned Citizens has enlisted legal help from Hamilton at the First Amendment Clinic. The clinic has sent letters to Hotard and other parish officials seeking an explanation and reconsideration of the cancellation. Several public records requests seeking emails and other communications about the screening’s denial have yielded no documents, Hamilton said.
While Hotard has so far avoided serious consequences from her disputes with community groups, Hamilton said the parish is likely bearing a financial burden in the form of legal fees.
He warned that more legal trouble may be coming.
“We’re certainly thinking about litigation,” Hamilton said. “But that seems like an expensive and difficult solution to a problem that could simply be solved by allowing the film to show.”
