In Some Kind Of Heaven, Oppenheim also took his camera to Florida, filming at The Villages, the country’s largest retirement community. There he found misfits trying to settle into the busy social schedule, sustain their marital spark, or perhaps even find love in a kind of fantasyland where residents drive golf carts and hold high expectations for their golden years. In 2024, Oppenheim followed up Some Kind Of Heaven with the unexpected Spermworld, a look at various families searching for sperm donors through the internet instead of a lab. That same year, his series Ren Faire followed a dying king of America’s largest renaissance festival with a Succession-struggle to find his successor. Throughout the films and TV series, Oppenheim avoids traditional talking-head interviews and instead puts his audience in the spaces where his subjects live, observing them through their daily routine and giving them the space to talk to the camera (often in voiceover), as his stylish coverage takes over the screen. The audience feels the Florida heat sending retirees to the pool, the awkwardness of approaching a stranger from the internet to be one genetic half of a couple’s future child, and the self-mythologizing a potential royal successor dabbles in to create and sustain a fantasy.
That same sensibility exists in The Python Hunt, where Robin looks at a number of teams on the hunt for the invasive species. There’s Toby, a Floridian writer with deep roots in the region who’s acting as a guide for Anne, an 80-something retiree who wants one more adventure before retreating back to her quiet life in her new state. The latter is one of the film’s most striking personalities, carrying a long knife at the ready should the occasion to kill a python arise. Then there’s the kindly San Franciscan, Richard, who hosts a big get-together for fellow snake hunters and seems equally driven by adventure and the chance to help the environment. Professional python hunter Jimbo and his daughter Shannon search for pythons together despite Jimbo’s disdain for the 1000 or so out-of-towners swooping in to kill snakes. Even though Jimbo can’t officially participate in the challenge, he does whip up interest in other local python-themed events, still cashing in on python season.
The subjects of The Python Hunt make for an intricate portrait of the different kinds of people who take on the daunting challenge of tracking down pythons in the dark, but it also counterbalances the state’s famous competition with a conflicting viewpoint: What if the snakes are not the only problem facing the Everglades? Briefly, the documentary explores the possibility that perhaps pesticides and human encroachment may have impacted local wildlife just as much as the theory that Hurricane Andrew knocked down a reptile dealer’s storage facility, setting hundreds of invasive snakes loose in the Everglades. The film doesn’t directly explore the xenophobic rhetoric from snake hunters, but the angry calls to protect the country from foreign invaders feels especially poignant given how much has politically changed in Florida in recent years. It’s a reminder that not all oddballs are harmless fun, and it’s an idea that Oppenheim has also featured in his earlier work, following subjects who could be just as cruel or inconsiderate as they could be charming.
Driving through Alligator Alley, the roadway cutting through the Everglades from South to Central Florida, you can only see so much of the local wildlife from the safety of your speeding car. This is why works like The Python Hunt, Some Kind Of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire are so important. They bring audiences into specific spaces, tiny worlds that may or may not be in plain sight, in order to humanize the people who are relearning who they are in their retirement age, trying to start a family no matter the route, attempting to entertain us—all the people you might see interviewed on the morning news. By immersing viewers in their stories and postcard-perfect views of the Everglades, The Python Hunt is just as much a love letter to this strange 10-day event as it is to the Floridians who give the state its characters and the visitors who keep coming back year after year hoping to catch a big snake.
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