Movie
First They Came for My College
Narrative tropes
Rebels vs. The Empire
highClear power imbalance: a governor-backed board with state legislative support (DeSantis statewide DEI legislation, Project 2025 trustee Matthew Spalding) dismantles an institution while students, faculty, and the student newspaper mount an outmatched resistance. The resisters are framed sympathetically throughout — the outspoken professor risking her job, the janitor saving discarded books ('This is my heritage'), students learning parliamentary procedure to fight board meetings designed to suppress them. The regime is shown as contemptuous ('casual contempt of trustees toward dissenting speakers') and ideologically ruthless. The film documents meaningful challenge — the 'Long live the null set' commencement moment, the Rocky Horror performance as queer defiance — without claiming victory, satisfying the 'meaningfully challenged' threshold. The fifth signal (victory) is partial, keeping the count at 4.
About this trope: A small outmatched group rises up against a massive oppressive regime or institutional power. The rebellion is framed as morally righteous.
Humans Never Give Up
mediumThe film's explicit framing is of 'unglamorous, procedural, human-scale resistance' against objectively hopeless odds: 40% faculty attrition, tenure denials, eliminated programs, and a board with contempt for dissent. Characters refuse to quit when surrender would be rational — a faculty member stays despite job threats, students file formal protests and master parliamentary procedure, the student body president closes commencement with 'Long live the null set.' The film's emotional climax is not a victory but the decision to keep going; it 'honestly depicts the futility of many efforts' while celebrating persistence itself as the story worth telling.
About this trope: Facing impossible odds, humans endure, adapt, and find reasons to keep going. Resilience and refusal to surrender is humanity's defining and most admirable trait.
Movies that share these tropes
Full plot (spoilers)
First They Came for My College is a 2026 American documentary directed and produced by Patrick Bresnan, following New College of Florida — a small, progressive public honors college in Sarasota — through roughly the first eighteen months after Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six conservative trustees to its board in January 2023. The film frames the takeover as deliberate and ideologically driven: one of the appointees, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, publicly described it as a 'hostile takeover,' and the documentary positions New College as the nation's first public college transformed through direct gubernatorial appointment — a blueprint, the film argues, for a broader national assault on academic freedom. The title invokes Martin Niemöller's postwar poem about the incremental targeting of marginalized groups under authoritarianism.
The board immediately fires president Patricia Okker and replaces her with former Republican Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran as interim president at a salary of roughly $699,000 per year. The film documents the cascade of institutional changes that follows: the gender studies program is eliminated; the Gender and Diversity Center is shuttered and its books and materials discarded (the documentary captures a janitor quietly saving them, saying 'This is my heritage'); DEI initiatives are abolished; tenure is denied to multiple professors; new athletics programs are added while academic departments contract. Within the first year approximately 40% of the faculty depart, and 68 faculty members sign a formal protest letter. The film includes footage of DeSantis signing statewide legislation abolishing DEI programs, contextualizing the New College situation within broader Florida policy. Matthew Spalding, later a key figure in Project 2025, is among the installed trustees.
Bresnan uses a cinema vérité approach, blending his own cinematography with footage shot by students on iPhones and recordings of board meetings. He embeds with the staff of the student newspaper The Catalyst, an outspoken faculty member who continues standing with students despite job threats, and students across the political spectrum — including conservative students recruited by the new administration — offering a range of perspectives. The film documents students learning parliamentary procedure specifically to navigate board meetings designed to limit public comment, and shows sustained but emotionally exhausting resistance through protests and public testimony. Board meeting footage captures what reviewers describe as the casual contempt of the new trustees toward dissenting speakers.
A widely discussed sequence depicts students reviving the campus tradition of a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow-cast performance — framed as a deliberate act of queer joy and cultural defiance. At commencement, billionaire Joe Ricketts delivers an address focused on wealth and artificial intelligence; the student body president responds with the phrase 'Long live the null set' — New College vernacular for resistance — and Ricketts is booed. The film does not claim a victory for the resistance; critics note it honestly depicts the futility of many efforts while documenting what unglamorous, procedural, human-scale resistance looks like. It won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2026 Florida Film Festival.
Sources: Wikipedia, Web search (multiple press reviews and distributor sources including Ms. Magazine, WBUR, Texas Standard, Hyperreal Film Club, VIMooZ, Roco Films, WSWS, MySuncoast, Deadline, AV Club)