There’s a particular kind of American optimism that says: Sure, a decades-long ecological catastrophe caused by escaped giant snakes breeding across a 1.5-million-acre subtropical wilderness can probably be solved by a guy named Jimbo with a flashlight and a dream.
That tension—between heroic effort, absurd spectacle, and the messes humans create for ourselves—slithers through The Python Hunt, director Xander Robin’s award-winning documentary screening July 8, 10, and 11 at Denizen Theatre in New Paltz.
The film follows the annual Florida Python Challenge, a state-sponsored competition that sends hunters into the Everglades for 10 days and nights in pursuit of one of the region’s strangest environmental threats: the Burmese python. Originally introduced through the exotic pet trade, the snakes have established a massive foothold in South Florida, where they have decimated populations of native mammals and transformed the food chain.
The solution? Well, that’s where things get weird.
Every year, a collection of professional hunters, amateur conservationists, thrill seekers, swamp philosophers, and snake-chasing obsessives head into the dark, humid wilderness hoping to capture the most pythons and claim the competition’s $10,000 grand prize. Some come to protect the Everglades. Some come for glory. Some seem like they were headed toward the swamp long before anyone mentioned snakes.
Robin knows the terrain well. A South Florida native, the filmmaker grew up surrounded by the reptiles that now occupy a complicated place in the state’s imagination. Before making the film, he entered the Python Challenge himself—paying the $25 registration fee, completing the required online training, and spending 10 nights searching the Everglades.
He caught exactly zero snakes, but what he found instead became the foundation of the documentary: the people drawn to an impossible problem.
“The Python Hunt is about the thousands of other people who showed up with the same idea, from amateurs convinced they could fix an unsolvable problem of our own making, to the gladesmen who watched wildlife disappear long before the pythons arrived,” Robin says.
Featuring hunters including Jimbo and Shannon McCartney, Tony Benoit, Anne Stratton Hilts, Richard Perenyi, Madison Oliveira, and Joe Wasilewski, The Python Hunt is less a monster movie than a portrait of humans wrestling with nature, nostalgia, and their own reasons for stepping into the swamp after dark.
Robin’s first feature, Are We Not Cats, premiered at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, and he later directed episodes of HBO’s “Chillin Island.” The Python Hunt won a Special Jury Award at SXSW 2025, the Audience Award at the Nashville Film Festival, and Best Florida Feature at the Key West Film Festival.
The Hollywood Reporter called the film “a wild and generally empathetic journey into the swamp of the American soul”—which sounds about right. Because eventually every python hunt becomes a human hunt. The snakes may be invasive, but the strangest creatures in the Everglades are still the ones carrying the flashlights.
