
Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web
Kim Schmitz built Megaupload into one of the internet's busiest file-sharing sites, made himself a fortune, and renamed himself Kim Dotcom before New Zealand police and the FBI came for him with helicopters. Annie Goldson's film reconstructs the 2012 paramilitary-style raid on his rented mansion outside Auckland, using news footage, courtroom material, and interviews with Dotcom himself, his lawyers, and journalists who covered the case. It lays out the US government's argument that Megaupload enabled mass copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale, and Dotcom's counter-argument that he is being pursued as a political scapegoat for the entertainment industry and an overreaching surveillance state. The film follows the extradition fight through New Zealand's courts, the revelation that the country's intelligence agency spied on him illegally, and the fallout for the New Zealand government that authorized the raid. It treats Dotcom neither as pure victim nor straightforward villain, letting his flamboyance and the legal stakes around internet freedom and copyright law sit uncomfortably side by side.