Academic’s film on Kim Dotcom up for Best Documentary

Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web, directed and co-produced by Professor Annie Goldson, from the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts, has been nominated for Best Documentary at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Screen Awards (APSAs).
Professor Goldson and her producer Alexander Behse have been invited to Brisbane to attend the red carpet event.

The APSAs draw on entries from regions including Eastern Europe, the Middle-East, South Asia, China and Oceania - 70 countries in all. Other previous and current nominees include the films Lion, A Separation, Last Men in Aleppo, The Look of Silence, 24 Frames and The Assassin.

“Films are judged on cinematic excellence and the way in which they attest to their cultural origins,” says Professor Goldson.

Her documentary explores the “life and times” of the internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom who is charged with criminal copyright violation and was arrested in a high-profile raid on his “Dotcom mansion” in Auckland, in 2012. The film premiered at SXSW in Austin Texas, has shown widely in other festivals and on digital release has gone on to reach #1 in iTunes in the US, Canada and Germany.

Working with the company DotDot, which was founded by two University of Auckland MA Screen graduates, Professor Goldson has developed a complementary web project, Caught in the Web (kimdotcom.film). This site hosts multiple extras, including mini-documentaries, streamed interviews and a book of edited transcriptions. “All these materials are licensed with Creative Commons which means they can be re-used for non-commercial purposes,” says Professor Goldson.

She recently gave a key-note speech at the Big Screen Symposium on how her film gelled with the symposium’s theme, “Authenticity and Pretense”, exploring in particular the filmmaker/subject relationship. The speech, along with supporting clips from the film, are available on The Big Q: Project for Media in the Public Interest.

Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web was funded by the New Zealand Film Commission with support from the Faculty of Arts Research Committees. Caught in the Web, the portal, was funded through a FRDF grant from the Faculty of Arts.