As head of film & creative media for the Austin Film Society, Holly Herrick may be synonymous with Austin, but her cultural roots lay in the New College of Florida. She said, “I’ve basically credited New College with the life I have now.” Now she’s repaying the life debt as producer of First They Came for My College, a documentary examining the right-wing attack on the campus and its students.
New College’s reputation was for academic rigor mixed with intellectual freedom, a bastion of truly progressive thinking. Then in 2023, the state of Florida threw that history out of the window and made it hostile to both the students and the lecturers who had called it home. Herrick said, “When Ron DeSantis basically out of nowhere announced the right-wing takeover of the college, the alumni community exploded.”
As an alumnus herself, Herrick wanted to get involved. Coming from a film background, she immediately realized that someone was going to make a documentary about this, “and that concerned me, because New College is a hard place to understand.” Yet she was still unsure that she was the person to tell this story until she had a long conversation with documentarian Margaret Brown (The Yogurt Shop Murders) and, Herrick recounted, “she said, ‘You could produce this with your eyes closed.’”
That’s when she made the seemingly surprising choice to reach out to Patrick Bresnan, who is better known for community-centric ethnographic studies like Pahokee and Naked Gardens than conventional narrative documentaries. Yet that’s exactly what she knew this film needed in a director – someone who would truly learn about New College as a place and a community. She said, “I knew that he would not arrive there thinking he knew the story.”
Bresnan recalled that when he first visited the campus, “it was like showing up to the Nineties. I felt like I was at a grunge concert, and you didn’t know what gender a person was and it didn’t matter. It was such an incredible place.” The initial thought was to make a short about the attempts to expel student body president Libby Harrity, “but I thought that the story was much bigger.”
What then ensued was a yearlong process to understand the campus, creating what Bresnan called “an underground film school,” equipping some students with their own iPhones so they could capture footage in places he wouldn’t go. At the same time, he then filmed in what he called “safe spaces” like the student food forest and garden, and the student newspaper offices. It was only after that initial year that he reached out to the college administration and explained what he was doing, and worked with them to explore their side of the story.
For Herrick, this wasn’t simply an abstract skirmish in the culture wars, but an attack on the academic processes that had made New College such a unique and affordable environment for students like herself. “This is tearing apart people’s lives,” she said. “This is removing the possibility of an amazing outcome.”
But Bresnan sees that the spirit of the old New College is not dead. On new student day, he filmed one of the incoming class, homeschooled and from a conservative family. “Last time I was there, he was walking around barefoot in eye shadow.”
First They Came for My College
Documentary Spotlight, Texas Premiere
Thursday 12, 6:15pm, Alamo Lamar
Friday 13, 5:45pm, AFS Cinema
Wednesday 18, 6pm, Rollins Theatre at the Long Center
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.