FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY COLLEGE

Q&A'S WITH DIRECTORS & PRODUCERS ON THE FOLLOWING SHOWTIMES:

• 9/18 @ 7 PM
• 9/20 @ 6 PM
• 9/21 @ 2 PM

Patrick Bresnan – Director and Director of Photography

Using precise, illustrative cinematic images, Patrick Bresnan makes vérité stories that counter the mythic concepts of America. He directed The Rabbit Hunt, which premiered in the US at Sundance and in Europe at the Berlinale. The film won over 20 awards, including the Cinema Eye Honor. He co-directed the short Skip Day, which won the Grand Jury Prize at The Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. He co-directed, shot, and produced the feature film Pahokee, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. His subsequent feature, Naked Gardens, premiered at Tribeca in 2022 and internationally at IDFA. He was a cinematographer on the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Boys State.

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Holly Herrick – Producer and New College Alum

Holly Herrick is a seasoned executive in the film non-profit sector, and currently serves Head of Film & Creative Media at Austin Film Society where she has overseen more than two million dollars in grant funds to filmmakers, established successful talent development programs that have launched major film careers, and helped launch the AFS Cinema, Austin's only non-profit arthouse. Herrick's background is in film programming and artist support, and she has served in producing roles on independent features that have premiered at Sundance, Rotterdam, and SXSW.

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Harry William Hanbury – Producer and New College Alum, Camera Operator

Harry William Hanbury is a writer and filmmaker who was on the founding team of producers of two investigative journalism nonprofits: the American News Project and Retro Report, a partnership with the New York Times. He has also produced for Discovery, six Hollywood studios, and dozens of nonprofits. He has an M.A. from Hunter College and taught world and U.S. history at Hunter College High School and King School.

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Zackary Drucker – Producer

Zackary Drucker is an Emmy-nominated director for the HBO Original documentary The Stroll (2023) and an Emmy-nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me (2015). She was a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Amazon show. Transparent (2014 - 2019), and produced the feature film Biosphere with Mark Duplass & Sterling K. Brown (Duplass Brothers Productions / IFC, 2022). The Lady and The Dale, her 4-part series and directorial debut for television, premiered on HBO in 2021 and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in 2022. In addition to being nominated for. Best Documentary at the News +Docs Emmy Awards, The Stroll won a Peabody Award in 2024 and a Special Jury Award: Clarity of Vision at Sundance 2023. Her standalone directorial feature Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl was released on Hulu in May 2023. Her latest documentary feature, Enigma, debuted at Sundance 2025.

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Director Patrick Bresnan spent a year embedded at New College of Florida, tracking what happened after Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a slate of new trustees, including Christopher Rufo, in 2023 with an explicit mandate to remake the small liberal arts school. Built from hundreds of hours of footage, much of it shot by the students themselves on iPhones Bresnan handed out, the film follows the dismantling of the college's gender studies program, a wave of faculty departures, and the students who kept showing up anyway: tending campus gardens, running the student newspaper, organizing an alternative graduation when the official one no longer felt like theirs.

The title nods to Martin Niemöller's postwar poem about how authoritarianism advances one group at a time while everyone else looks away, and the film argues that what happened at this 700-student campus in Sarasota has since become a template used at public universities well beyond Florida. It's a documentary with a clear point of view; New College's current administration has publicly disputed the film's framing, calling it a one-sided account of a necessary rescue rather than a hostile takeover, so the debate itself is very much part of the story your audience is walking into.

Premiered at SXSW 2026, with additional stops at True/False and the Independent Film Festival Boston.