Boris Saavedra Went Looking for the Everglades’ Most Notorious Predator. The Everglades Had Other Plans.

In his forthcoming documentary Invasion of the Everglades, Peruvian wildlife photographer Boris Saavedra takes on one of America’s most closely watched conservation stories, and turns a failed search into a portrait of an ecosystem under pressure.

Boris Saavedra has built his career on patience. The Peruvian wildlife photographer has spent many years photographing animals in the places where they are hardest to reach. For his most ambitious project to date, he brought a full documentary crew to the Florida Everglades with a single objective: find and photograph a Burmese python in the wild.

The Burmese python has become the symbol of South Florida’s ecological crisis, an invasive predator blamed for reshaping one of the most famous wetlands in the world. It is a story that has largely been told by Americans, for American television. Saavedra arrived with an outsider’s eye and an assumption: an animal with that kind of impact would be easy to find.

“Everyone talks about the python as if it’s everywhere,” he says. “I thought the hard part would be the photograph, not finding the animal. I was wrong about that on the first night.”

An Invisible Predator

Over two days and nights, Saavedra led his team along the roadsides, canals and sawgrass, working with cinema cameras, drones, high-powered lights and thermal-imaging equipment. Hours passed without a single python.

Another photographer might have called it a lost shoot. Saavedra recognized that the absence was the story. Dense vegetation and an enormous landscape let a very large snake vanish completely. Knowing the pythons are there and actually seeing one turned out to be two different things.

“You can drive for hours knowing they’re out there and never see one,” Saavedra says. “That’s what makes them so dangerous for this place: an animal that big can disappear completely. The damage is visible, but the cause is not.”

What the Everglades Offered Instead

The wetlands were anything but empty. Saavedra photographed multiple native snakes, including a cottonmouth he met at uncomfortably close range on a trail. In the film’s most striking sequence, the crew came upon an alligator feeding on a wild boar, close to a route people travel every day. Boris Saavedra shot it as it happened, with no staging and no second take.

After dark, a deep roar from beyond the reach of the lights stopped the group cold. They never identified the animal, and Saavedra kept the cameras rolling.

Among the Python Hunters

The project also brought Saavedra into the company of the people who have defined this story for the public. At the restaurant associated with Dusty “Wildman” Crum of Guardians of the Glades and Swamp People: Serpent Invasion, he examined captured Burmese pythons up close and gathered firsthand accounts from people who have spent years tracking them. Seeing their size and camouflage explained what two days in the field had not.

Later that night, Saavedra and his crew worked alongside Donna Kalil, one of South Florida’s best-known professional python hunters. The unplanned meeting turned into a rescue when the group found turtles trying to cross the road and helped Kalil move them to safety.

“Donna has spent years learning how to see what I couldn’t find in two days,” Saavedra says. “And then we ended up carrying turtles off the road together. That was the moment I understood the film isn’t only about the python; it’s about everything that lives around it.”

The Search Continues

Invasion of the Everglades began as Boris Saavedra’s hunt for one invasive predator. Under his direction it became something larger: a document of the ecosystem that predator is changing, told by a photographer willing to let the story go where the landscape took it.

The production built around Saavedra’s work combines documentary cinematography, still photography, drone footage and thermal imaging. Michael Chopra serves as cinematographer and editor, with a dedicated behind-the-scenes photography team of Anastasiia Oliinyk and Artem Shestakov. Film producer Roberto Linck joined the expedition.

Saavedra came home without the one image he went for.

“I came home with images I never planned to take and without the one I went for,” he says. “So for me this project is still open. I’m going back.”

Invasion of the Everglades, by Boris Saavedra, is scheduled for release in November 2026.