FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY COLLEGE

‍

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.