The 21st Edition of the HotDocs Film Festival (April 24th – May 4th), will present a selection of 197 award winning documentaries from Canada and around the world and T-Mak World will be there.
April 12th, 2014: The brilliance of youth can sometimes turn tragic. None more so than the programming prodigy and wunderkind Aaron Swartz, whose intersection of copyright legislation, political advocacy and the internet laid bare revolutionary changes with seismic consequences for the one-percent. And Aaron achieved all this before the tender age of 26. A believer in free access to knowledge, Aaron’s finely tuned Guerilla Open Access Manifesto emphatically painted outside the lines of conformity. And it’s precisely because of his affront to the establishment combined with an exaggerated sense of self that he was able to change the game in Director Brian Knappenberger’s compelling documentary, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.”
The creator of Infogami, Open Library and the co-founder of Reddit, who attended Stanford and was a Research Fellow at Harvard, liberated nearly four million academic articles from the online service JSTOR which caught the eye of the FBI. And even after JSTOR dropped the charges, the over-reaching Federal Prosecutor’s dogged determination on The United States of America vs Aaron Swartz case still brought the hammer down with tactics, some say, bordered on prosecutorial misconduct. Undeterred, Aaron strident demeanor and grassroots campaign managed to achieve his greatest victory by preventing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). With two counts of wire fraud, 11 violations under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and a 35 year jail sentence looming large, the US government wanted to show the entire hacktivist community what will happen if they dare challenge the establishment.
Verdict 4.5 out of 5: Director Brian Knappenberger dramatically framed the life of Aaron Swartz around the two year legal odyssey as an advocate for civil liberties with martyr-esque zeal. Candid and poignant stories of youth from friends and family help cement this inspirational anomaly. By highlighting the selective deterrence upon which the US government prosecutes, the Aaron Swartz story shows what happens when a brilliant yet temperamental mind tries to change a broken system. Knappenberger struggles at times with content overload that inevitably hobbles the narrative. Still, as a truly extraordinary thinker we bear witness to the frailties of a kid who punches far above his weight with blinders on. Aaron was able to commanding the ears of such intellectual luminaries as Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Berners-Lee. Knappenberger is now waking the rest of us up.
Everyone has licence to speak, it’s all about who gets heard.
Country: USA
Language: English
Premiere: International Premiere
Canadian Release Date: April 2014
Director: Brian Knappenberger
Writer: Brian Knappenberger
Executive Producers: Brian Knappenberger, Charlie Annenberg
Website: www.aaronswartzthedocumentary.com
Runtime: 105 Minutes
Cast: Tim Berners-Lee, Cory Doctorow, Peter Eckersley, Lawrence Lessig, David Segal, David Sirota, Taren Steinebrickner-Kauffman, Matt Stoller, Trevor Timm, Ben Wikler, Ron Wyden