You can’t have a picnic on the beach and then get upset when Seagulls shows up. And when you advertise a free-for-all python hunting competition that offers cash to anyone willing to run through swamps in the middle of the night and get back deadly snakes, you really have no right to complain when Strange characters Start to appear outside the door.
But it’s not like I have a better idea to execute the invasive Burmese python population in Florida Everglades. Since 1992, when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Miami during an animal life convention and released foreign species in the state swamp, these suffocating snakes have been reproduced in Everglades and partyed on native species. The vast majority of Florida preservation enthusiasts want these intruders away — like most normal people, who do not need a principle reason for preferable not to live anywhere close to 20 feet Python.
The prevalence of python and the difficulty of removing them has created a cottage industry by Python hunter. The state of Florida has been willing to pay licensed professionals to spend their nights driving through deserted roads in Everglades and looking for these snakes and bringing them back dead. Eventually, some brilliant bureaucrats realized that people were motivated by competition, and Florida Python Challenge was born. Every October, Florida invites professional and amateur pytone hunters from all over the world to Everglades for a 10-night competition to see who can remove the most nightly snakes. The results are ultimately a decrease in the bucket – most competitions remove a few hundred python from a population of hundreds of thousands – but damn, do so for an entertaining cinema.
Xander Robin’s documentary ”The python hunt“Follows a coterie of errors that go down on Everglades to compete in the festivities. The ensemble of characters that make up the Florida-fied “Cannonball Run” includes Anne, a widow’s grandmother and self-described “nature lovers” who decides to participate in the competition as a last adventure and shows a sadistic obsession with knife-cutting python through the brain; Toby Benoit, a tobacco chegging journalist and swamp enthusiast who offers to be Annes Chaperone; And Jimbo, a local Python hunting enthusiast that is so bitter about being banned from the event of cheating accusations that he spends his days making false Pythons to deceive the out-of-state tourists on which he looks down.
The hunters spend 10 nights on affecting Everglades back roads with the hope of enough in the largest snakes they can find, which often shows an obvious breach of personal security. The film Has some impressive moments of snake actors, but the real attraction is the human drama that comes out of the greater than life personalities. Everyone has different motifs, from principled preservatives to sadistic murderers to observers who are just looking for different species as if they play a big game with Pokemon Go. And although it can be fun to see how much of their identity that some people get from their status in a niche world of snake hunting, the film makes room for some major conversations about the role that extinction plays in preservation.
It does not deny that Pythons poses a real threat to Florida’s ecosystem, but different voices in the Python hunting society have different opinions on how to handle it. Some feel that the played aspect of these hunting competitions takes the wrong type of people from the wooden plant, and giving them permission to kill python will eventually lead to them harming the species we we we lack to preserve. Others feel that government officials use the Python problem as a sensational story to draw attention from major environmental issues such as pollution. And some are so libertarian in their attitude to snake hunting that they think the government should not matter and simply leave Florida natives to tend to their own swamp. The conversations are fascinating, but it sometimes feels like arranging wheelchairs on Titanic, as there has never been a successful removal of an invasive reptile population and the pythons breed much faster than anyone in Florida can get rid of them.
Nothing is ever certain in the world of film distribution, but I would be stunned if “The Python Hunt” is not picked up by a streamer and becomes at least a less cultural phenomenon. The prerequisite is too convincing and the characters are too crazy not to crack mainstream in any way. The trop “Florida Man does Crazy Shit” has been overplayed in recent years (and if your bandwidth for such a discourse is really spent, perhaps seeking your entertainment elsewhere), but “The Python Hunt” can only be the rare project that is unreasonable enough to break through a saturated niche and be the next “silent.”
Rating: B+
“The Python Hunt” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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