Hellcat

A film by Fax Bahr

Would you please donate to help us get this film campaign to more viewers?

HELLCAT was designed to ENGAGE AND ENRAGE.

We need to raise $300,000 to:

Get this film into more legislators’ hands so that the hard-won efforts by Diane Wilson and her partners’ “stick”
Get Hellcat into film festivals across the country
- To raise awareness of Diane’s work and the travesty of plastics in our waterways and their health impacts on people and marine animals

Help us pay some still outstanding bills for the production of this film including archival footage fees and immediate future travel costs associated with screenings to clubs and organizations across Texas and the US

DONATION CREDITS
Under $500 – Special thanks!
$500 – ENGAGER
$2,500 – ACTIVATOR
$5,000 – HELLCAT
$25,000 – ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
$50,000 – CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
$100,000 – EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Feature documentary Hellcat chronicles shrimp boat captain Diane Wilson’s harrowing 35-year war against the petrochemical giants that have polluted, and nearly destroyed, the Texas Gulf Coast bays her family has fished for a century. Written and Directed by Fax Bahr (HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S Apocalypse).

Trailer link

SYNOPSIS: When she learns her county ranks number one in the nation for toxic discharge, Diane – a mother of five with a high school education – calls community meetings, stages street protests and hunger strikes, and cultivates a network of whistleblowers. She suffers intense retaliation. Her dog is shot. Helicopters circle her house. She nearly drowns when her boat is sabotaged.

Diane fights on, going toe-to-toe with petrochemical multinational Formosa Plastics spewing plastic pellets into her beloved Matagorda Bay. After collecting millions of illegally discharged plastic pellets from bay shores and bayous, Diane sues Formosa and wins a $50 million settlement, the largest Clean Water Act lawsuit penalty in history.

Taking no money personally, she invests it all back into restoring and preserving the Bay. She oversees Formosa’s pellet court mandated clean up, and funds a commercial fishing cooperative. In 2023, Diane is awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. But the fight is far from over.

In early 2024, Diane learns that an oil pipeline company has submitted plans to dredge Matagorda Bay to create a new deep water port for Permian oil exports to foreign markets – directly through a superfund site. The dredge will spread mercury deposits from an old Alcoa Aluminum plant throughout the water column, destroying marine life and the fisheries she protects. She goes on a 37 day hunger strike, ending it by locking herself to the gates of the Army Corps of Engineers office, who supply the dredging permits. After arrest and release, the Army Corps agrees to a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, shelving the project.

Then, in 2025, she discovers that Exxon has filed for permits to build the largest plastic pellet manufacturing facility on the planet between the Formosa and abandoned Alcoa plants on the shores of Matagorda Bay. “I’ll be fighting until my last breath”, she says, as she climbs into her truck and drives into battle…

Through the lens of her epic battle, Hellcat offers a boots-on-the-ground view of a fight for humankind’s most precious resource – clean water. In telling the specifics of Diane’s story, we point to a larger environmental justice story playing out in low income, fence line communities across the planet – how industrial polluters skirt regulation, bully communities, and continue to squander our dwindling water supply.

Associated Members

Fax Bahr, Director

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Tani Cohen, Producer

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Hellcat

A film by Fax Bahr

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