3 out of 5

Director: Simon Klose

Typical of documentaries, ‘TPB AFK’ struggles a bit with finding a beginning and ending, using the trials of The Pirate Bay as a logical core around which to circle, but the effectiveness of the film is further diluted with some really oddly chosen / incorporated exterior characters and drama, and the more stylized moments set to yesterday’s hottest indie croon tend to jut up oddly against the fly-on-the-wall stuff.  Thankfully, its kept short – just over an hour – and the trio on which we focus have enough personality between them to make them not just faceless IT slobs, plus the luck of having a member with an articulate ‘voice’ – Patrik – to gives some solidity to their anti-movement.

The film thankfully doesn’t go out of its way to miscast the corporate faces as incompetent, and it allows the three Pirate Bay fixtures room to look foolish, but on the whole we’re on the side of TPB.  (…though given the options how can you not be.)  If there is a notable bias to be found, it’s that more face-time is given to Patrik, whose retroactive rhetoric does make a whole lotta’ sense, even though he’s aware that change ain’t gonna’ happen overnight via one website, no matter how massive.  This focus might be unavoidable as he (according to the doc) is regarded as the current mouthpiece for the Bay, but that’s where the question of the point of this comes in.  It’s not an effective coverage of the trial, as we really only get snippets of some questions and answers and then the boys smirking that nothing’s really going to come of this (through the trial and a couple rounds of appeals).  It’s not a tech-head movie, as the computer coverage is just sort of done to prove to us that these guys know what they’re doing, and common terms are defined helpfully on screen.  We briefly see the “gee shucks I just like machines” network guy get married, but there’s the sense that this is only filmed ’cause it happened during the time covered, so it’s not really a study of the people involved.  And there’s a glimpse of some kind of TPB hacker fan-group (or something) that isn’t really explained, but then we divert to Frederik (network guy) and the ‘fuck-em-all’ coder guy rather making fools of themselves either through drunken debauchery (the former) or swear-filled snidery (the latter)… so it’s not explicitly a ra-ra film either.

So what is it?

It’s a documentary where a camera was trained on some people over a period of time, then cut with some music and driving sequences and some exterior bits stitched in to give the narrative ‘weight’.  It’s not a very good documentary structurally, or tonally.  However, the topic makes it interesting, and the ratio of talking heads are well handled and paced to keep it interesting for its whole hour.  So it succeeds despite itself.  And I’ll say it is a pretty easy way to give someone without a glimmer of this world a grasp on what it means and how “the kids are stealing music” looks in a courtroom.  So I’d watch it with my parents.  And then show them how to torrent.