A film tracking the conservative takeover of New College of Florida, titled โFirst They Came For Our Collegeโ, has hit the big screens. It just finished a run at the South By Southwest festival in Texas.
WMNFโs Chris Young spoke with the filmโs producer, New College alumnus Harry William Hanbury, and director Patrick Bresnan about why the story of the Sarasota school is relevant to audiences nationwide.
Patrick Bresnan: I knew immediately that there was a very important film to make here because emotions were so high when I arrived on campus, I had never seen anything like it. These were not, students protesting wars in a foreign country. These were students protesting the firing of the president of their college, who would go and sit in the cafeteria with them on a weekly basis, whose door was always open. Their professors, who had passed all of the requirements to receive tenure, were being denied tenure. Their librarian was fired. And this very peaceful, highly rigorous academic college had just been turned into a battleground. And this story had to be told. It had to be documented.
CY: Especially as a New College alum, how did it feel to go back on campus with the camera, seeing everything that is happening?
Harry William Hanbury: For a long time it reminded me of this great film about the French Resistance. Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969, where you know, all the people who were resisting the Nazis were kind of creeping around, doing these, you know, secret handoffs. There were new surveillance cameras installed all over campus. So I felt very much like an interloper, like I was not welcome in my own home, which was awkward, painful, scary. We finally did reach out to administration and did a lot of filming on campus with their full approval.
This story first appeared at WMNF News, which is part of the Tampa Bay Journalism Project (TBJP), a nascent Creative Loafing Tampa Bay effort supported by grants and a coalition of donors who make specific contributions via the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. If you are a non-paywalled Bay area publication or donor interested in Tampa Bay Journalism Project, please email rroa@ctampa.com. Support WMNF News by visiting the community radio stationโs support page.
CY:ย Were there any times that the camera captured something that surprised even you guys?ย
HH: I think the gutting of the Gender and Diversity Center was a real gut punch to me when I first stepped foot on campus. After 30 years I was extremely emotional when I saw the Gender and Diversity Center because there was nothing like that for me when I was a queer kid, you know, just coming to New College. There was a very supportive environment, but students had built that over 30 years. And to see that was just completely emptied โ all of the care that students put into accumulating hundreds and hundreds of books, they were just thrown in the trash, at the end of the summer when no students were around. So I did not film that scene, but watching it was extremely emotional.
CY: And you guys were recently at South by Southwest. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
PB: South By is a really big festival. Itโs an incredible audience. Our screenings were sold out. People were in tears. Our students, really, when we do Q&A after a film, we had three students with us and Amy Reid. And so we just kind of turned the mic over to them and allowed them to interact with the audience. So itโs a profound experience for people whoโve gone through this, itโs very hard to relive a lot of what they went through, but itโs just so meaningful to see the outpouring of support that audiences have had for people whoโve been through this.
In an email, New College President Richard Corcoran called the film โsensationalizedโ and โdisconnected from the reality of whatโs happening on campus.โ
The film will be shown at the Florida Film Festival in Central Florida in April, according to the filmmakers.
Support the film atย www.newcollegefilm.com.
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This article appears in Mar. 12 – 18, 2026.