A documentary about a Vietnam veteran, a Hells Angels rider turned Baja California conservationist, and his 19-year friendship with a 22-foot oceanic manta ray is set to launch its national theatrical run at San Diego's Balboa Theatre. The Last Dive holds its world theatrical premiere on August 19 at 6 p.m. at the downtown venue, kicking off a 20-city U.S. tour that runs through November.
The event, which carries an 18-plus age requirement, is far more than a standard movie screening. According to KPBS, the evening includes a red carpet, a guided meditation, a healing activation, a raffle, a post-film panel discussion, and a Daybreaker dance party. The film itself follows Terry Kennedy, an American veteran in his 80s now living in Baja, Mexico, whose relationship with a giant manta ray he named Willy reshaped his life.
From Hells Angels to Ocean Advocate
Kennedy's path to the water was anything but conventional. He served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, rode with the Hells Angels, ran a Santa Monica music bar frequented by The Doors, and did time in prison before relocating to Baja, where he went on to log more than 14,000 ocean dives, according to The Guardian. It was off San Benedicto Island in Mexico's remote Revillagigedo Islands in December 1988 that Kennedy first encountered Willy, the manta ray whose bond with him would stretch nearly two decades.
The film recounts how Willy would slap his wings against the hull of Kennedy's sailboat to signal it was time for their next dive together, a ritual the two shared for years as they explored the ocean's depths side by side. Willy vanished after a 2007 dive expedition, and Kennedy, according to the film's account, still hopes to reunite with him. In the documentary, Kennedy embarks on a final journey back to the remote island where their story began, a trip the film frames as an unexpected conservationist's last chance encounter with the animal that transformed him.
Tribeca Honors and a Veteran Filmmaking Team
The Last Dive is not arriving in San Diego untested. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on World Ocean Day in June 2025, where cinematographers Chance Falkner and Johnny Friday won the festival's award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature. Director Cody Sheehy helmed the project, with producer Mark Monroe, whose credits include the Academy Award-winning documentaries Icarus and The Cove, co-writing and producing.
The San Diego premiere doubles as the launch event for a nationwide educational impact campaign, and it's backed locally by Randomgood Films. The screening's post-film panel is stacked with figures from marine science and veteran advocacy: director Cody Sheehy, NRDC Western Director Joel Reynolds, Sierra Club San Diego Chapter Director Mark West, manta researcher Jane Vinesky, Warfighter Scuba founder and president Nick Powers, WILDCOAST executive director Serge Dedina, Ph.D., and special guest Terry Kennedy himself.
Local Advocates and a Global Crisis for Manta Rays
Dedina, the former mayor of Imperial Beach, has become one of San Diego's most prominent coastal advocates, pushing for binational water quality accountability and marine protected areas along the U.S.-Mexico border — work Hoodline detailed in a recent report on South Bay beach bans. Powers, meanwhile, founded Warfighter Scuba, a nonprofit that provides combat-wounded NATO military veterans with free travel, lodging, and adaptive scuba certification trips in Roatan, Honduras, as therapeutic rehabilitation for physical injuries and PTSD, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The panel's presence underscores the urgency behind the film's message. Giant oceanic manta rays were formally uplisted to Endangered on the IUCN Red List in 2020 and remain listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, per the MarineBio Conservation Society. A landmark global study published in November 2025 by the Manta Trust estimated that more than 265,000 mobulid rays — mantas and devil rays — are killed annually worldwide, with small-scale artisanal fisheries responsible for 87% of those deaths.
A Historic Venue for a Modern Conservation Story
The Balboa Theatre itself carries its own story of near-loss and revival. Built in 1924 as a vaudeville and movie palace, the downtown San Diego venue at 868 4th Ave. closed in 1986 and sat dark for more than 20 years. San Diego's redevelopment agency committed in 2002 to restoring the theater, ultimately investing more than $26 million before it reopened in January 2008.
That history of restoration echoes the film's own themes of second chances, both for Kennedy and for the species he's spent decades trying to protect. As Hoodline noted in coverage of a recent Civic Theatre show, San Diego Theatres designates its official portal and Ticketmaster as the sole authorized ticket sellers for events at the Balboa Theatre and San Diego Civic Theatre, a policy worth knowing before buying tickets for the August 19 premiere.
