The Python Hunt
Director(s): Xander Robin
Film description: Follows a group of hunters over ten nights confronting dangerous terrain, nocturnal creatures, and their own desires, during an invasive python removal contest in the Florida Everglades.
ERIC SAYS Florida looms large in the mythology of America, a place that is somehow other than the rest of the country while paradoxically typifying so much that is uniquely American—and doing it so, well, bigly. Python Hunt nails this loud, sweaty multidimensional paradox of Florida by embedding us with multiple colorful participants in a government-sponsored contest to bag the most specimens of a wildly dangerous invasive species.
The Python Hunt gifts us a cast of real-life characters that at times feel like they’ve crossed over from a reel of Spring Breakers or The Beach Bum. Throughout, director Xander Robin demonstrates a gift for storytelling as strong as that of the rugged but self-reflective real-life travel writer in which The Python Hunt finds its poetic heart. The result is perhaps the strangest and most entertaining contest-centered doc since the likes of The King of Kong and Hands on a Hard Body. (Eric Allen Hatch)
Writer(s): Xander Robin
Producer(s): Xander Robin, Lance Oppenheim, Mel Oppenheim, Lauren Cioffi
Editor(s): Max Allman
Cinematographer(s): David Bolen, Matt Clegg
Country of origin: USA
Principal cast: Participants/hunters (nontraditional cast)
Language: English
Year: 2025
Duration: 91 min
Premiere status: Maryland Premiere
