DEEP WEB (Alex Winter, USA). 90 minutes. Rating: NNN
Actor-turned-documentarian Alex Winter last came to Hot Docs with the Napster history Downloaded. His new project is considerably grimmer, marrying a history of the darker side of the Internet with the prosecution of Ross Ulbricht, charged in 2013 with running the illicit online marketplace called the Silk Road under the alias of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Ulbricht – a libertarian hacker who claimed to have created the Silk Road as “an economic experiment” – certainly doesn’t seem like the sort of person the FBI accused of commissioning six murders for hire, a key element in the case against him that somehow vanished from the list of charges when Ulbricht was brought to trial.
Winter relies heavily on Wired journalist Andy Greenberg and a few other talking heads to unpack the subtleties of the case, which threatens to bog Deep Web down in technical jargon. But it picks up speed once Ulbricht’s trial begins and strange holes begin to appear in the government’s case against him, suggesting the “deep web” of the title might have more to do with a conspiracy to obscure civil-rights violations and secure a conviction than the darknet.
Apr 26, 6:30 pm Bloor Hot Docs Apr 27, 1:30 pm, TIFF 1 Apr 30, 9 pm, Kingsway
