The Python Hunt (Documentary)

Rating:

Director: Xander Robin
Producer: Dani Bernfeld,Mel Oppenheim,Lauren Cioffi,Lance Oppenheim,Gillian Brown
Cinematographer: David Bolen,Matt Clegg
Composer: Nick Leon
Editor: Max Allman
Featured Subjects: Toby Benoit,Madison Oliveira,Richard Perenyi,Jimbo McCartney,Joe Wasilewski,Anne Stratton Hilts,Shannon McCartney

Viewer Advice: Contains depictions of violence towards animals.

A group of eclectic Floridians embark on an annual python hunt in this madcap SXSW Special Jury Award winner.

Over 10 nights in Florida’s Everglades, a bizarre annual ritual takes place at the behest of local government. For these participants, pest control is more than just a flyswatter or a mozzie zapper: it’s a whole big enterprise worth $10,000, wherein a cast of oddball characters brave dangerous croc-infested swamps with all the chaotic zeal of Tiger King meets early Errol Morris (Vernon, Florida, MIFF 1982). Join these misfit amateur hunters as, with wide-eyed abandon (perhaps to escape their own lingering, slithering demons), they attempt to catch the elusive and invasive six-metre-long Burmese pythons – while dismayed observers seek to highlight just how environmentally crazy this whole thing is.

Only a local could shoot all of these events with the love and respect brought to this project by Florida-born filmmaker Xander Robin, and he tackles documentary here with the same irreverent verve with which he approached fiction in 2016’s cult curiosity Are We Not Cats. Covering this serpentine story from all of its angles, Robin’s film – produced by fellow virtuoso documentarian Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, MIFF 2020) – may just have you wondering who the real invasive species is after all.

“Does it make for some entertaining cinema … [ought to] become at least a minor cultural phenomenon.” – IndieWire