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My Vingren is no stranger to uncovering secrets hidden beneath the surface. As an award-winning Swedish journalist, she’s made a career out of investigative work diving deep into sinister corners of the internet. Her latest investigation, meticulously chronicled in the new documentary Hacking Hate, may be her most unsettling yet.

Directed by Simon Klose, Hacking Hate had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, where it took home the prize for Best Documentary Feature. Through Klose’s lenses, we follow Vingren as she goes undercover yet again. This time her mission is to reveal the disturbing ties between mainstream social media and the proliferation of online white supremacy.

It begins with Vingren setting her sights on a Swedish YouTuber spreading a different type of influence. As she digs deeper, his channel leads her to connections with underground neo-Nazi networks, a troubling world where propaganda and profit seem to go hand in hand.

A tense documentary that winds its way through online right-wing politics, Simon Klose’s “Hacking Hate” is a detailed (if occasionally disconnected) exposé of contemporary extremism. It follows Swedish journalist My Vingren as she embeds herself within white supremacist digital spaces. By chronicling her investigations, as well as her interviews with several experts on content moderation, the film introduces numerous parallel threads spanning the entire globe, from the U.S. to Scandinavia and beyond, though it doesn’t always manage to weave them together.

Vingren is a committed and knowledgeable subject, referred to by some as the real-life “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Her proclivity for tracing online footprints comes in handy during “Hacking Hate,” when she not only creates numerous fake profiles to court invites from white nationalist groups, but finds a trail of digital breadcrumbs where most would not think to look. In the process, she gradually uncovers...

New York – The 23rd annual Tribeca Festival, presented by Okx, today announced the winners in its competition categories at an awards ceremony at Racket NYC. The top honors went to “Griffin in Summer” for the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, “Bikechess” for Best International Narrative Feature, and “Hacking Hate” for Best Documentary Feature.

“Griffin in Summer” (Dir: Nicolas Colia) involves 14-year-old Griffin Nafly, who during summer vacations gets down to the serious business of putting on his dramatic new play … an ambitious cross between “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “American Beauty.” However, when his tween collaborators get distracted by more trivial pursuits like boys and camp, Griffin’s attention drifts toward Brad, the zoned-out handyman working at his house.

2024 Tribeca Best U.S. Narrative: ‘Griffin in Summer’

Photo credit: TribecaFilm.com

Best International Narrative Feature “Bikechess” (Dir: Assel Aushakimova) involves Saltanat Nauruz as Dina,...

Griffin in Summer won the Founders Award for best U.S. narrative feature as well as two additional awards: special jury mention for new narrative director for Nicholas Colia and best screenplay in a U.S. narrative feature, which also went to Colia.

Meanwhile, Bikechess won Best International Narrative Feature, and Hacking Hate won Best Documentary Feature. Don’t You Let Me Go won the 12th annual Nora Ephron Award, and Come Closer and Witches topped the first Viewpoints Competition.

Additionally, Nnamdi Asomugha‘s The Knife won two awards: best cinematography in a U.S. narrative feature (Alejandro Mejia) and the best new narrative director award for Asomugha.

Some Rain Must Fall also won two awards.

A full list of this year’s winners follows.

More to come.

U.S. Narrative Competition

Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature: Griffin in Summer, director Nicholas Colia

Best Performance in a U.

Nicholas Colia’s Griffin in Summer swept the narrative features award categories at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, nabbing honors for best U.S. film and screenplay, as well as a special jury mention for new narrative director.

Colia’s feature debut stars Everett Blunck as an aspiring 14-year-old playwright who falls hard for his mother’s handyman and struggling performance artist, played by Owen Teague. The jury mentioned in its notes Thursday that the film “straddled the very thin line between heartwarming, tragic, hilarious and awkward” and that it “fills a void in the marketplace for films that touch on sophisticated themes while remaining family friendly. Never pandering, always fresh, full of relatable universal experiences while being incredibly specific and nuanced.”

Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux won for Best Performance in a U.S. Narrative Feature for Jazzy, by Morrisa Maltz, a follow-up to her 2023 The Unknown Country starring Lily Gladstone. The Killers...

As the 2024 Tribeca Festival comes to a close, the top film prizes have just been announced at an awards ceremony at Racket NYC. This year, the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature went to “Griffin in Summer,” while “Bikechess” scored the prize of Best International Narrative Feature, and “Hacking Hate,” Best Documentary Feature. The competition categories include Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Viewpoints, Human/Nature, and Tribeca X.

“After a banner year of Tribeca programming, I do not envy our jurors’ task of selecting this year’s winners,” said Tribeca Festival Director and SVP of Programming Cara Cusumano. “I’m delighted to see they’ve chosen to honor a diverse, international, adventurous group of films that truly reflect the Tribeca spirit. We can’t wait to continue to follow and support all these films’ journeys into the world.”

The Audience Award winners will be announced at a later date,...

Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Jonathan Pryce, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and David Tennant have joined the cast of Netflix and Amblin Entertainment’s “The Thursday Murder Club,” based on Richard Osman’s novel of the same name.

According to an official logline, the series follows, “a group of friends in a retirement home who gather to solve murders for fun, but find themselves caught in a real case. The four members of the club are played by Helen Mirren (ex-spy Elizabeth), Sir Ben Kingsley (ex-psychiatrist Ibrahim) Pierce Brosnan (former union activist Ron) and Celia Imrie (ex-nurse Joyce).”

Chris Columbus serves as writer, director and producer with Jennifer Todd. Holly Bario, Jeb Brody, Eleanor Columbus and Jo Burn executive produce.

Tribeca Festival 2024 Competition Winners Include ‘Griffin in Summer,’ ‘Bikechess,’ ‘Hacking Hate’

Tribeca Festival has announced the 2024 winners of its competition categories at an awards ceremony at Racket NYC. Top awards went to “Griffin in Summer,...

In case you weren’t aware of the evils of social media, or if you otherwise needed another reason to despise Elon Musk, it’s worth taking a look at Hacking Hate, an eye-opening study of the power that far-right influencers wield both online and in the real world.

Directed by Simon Klose (Tpb Afk: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard) and featuring Swedish investigative reporter My Vingren, the film ushers the viewer down a rabbit hole where muscle-bound YouTubers, racist zealots and DJs-turned-Russian agitators pollute the internet in pursuit of personal and political plunder. It’s an ugly world to enter, and one that the brave Vingren never shies away from, putting herself at risk as she tries to get to the bottom of a long and elusive digital trail.

It all begins when Vingren, whose journalistic exploits and hacking capabilities have earned her the nickname “the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in Sweden,...

Just about anyone who spends considerable time on the internet knows that hate speech proliferates on social media like a virus. But would you be surprised to learn that tech corporations tacitly condone such bigotry in order to profit off the engagement that far-right influencers generate? If you were previously unaware of such in-your-face malfeasance, Simon Klose’s new documentary “Hacking Hate” unpacks the ways that social media companies benefit from the amplification of white supremacy online and how they’re complicit in its real-world effects. Through slick photography that utilizes the visual language of genre films and digital life, Klose’s activist procedural illustrate the failures of the tech world to safeguard society through one reporter’s undercover operation into a Nazi organization.

The reporter in question is My Vingren, an award-winning investigative journalist described by the media as “the real life ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’” seemingly because...

Momento Film, the leading Swedish banner founded by David Herdies (“Winter Buoy”) and Michael Krotkiewski (“Bellum — The Daemon Of War”), is boasting a slate of projects including the documentaries “Leaving Jesus” and “The Underdog,” as well as Simón Mesa Soto’s “A Poet.”

While at Cannes, the banner also started teasing one of its biggest project so far, “The Swedish Torpedo,” Frida Kempff (“Winter Buoy”)’s period film inspired by the life of Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian to swim across the English Channel in 1939. “The Swedish Torpedo” will start shooting in August with a topnotch cast led by Josefin Neldén, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, as well as Lisa Carlehed (“The Emigrants”).

Co-produced by Sweden, Estonia, Belgium and England, the film opens in 1939, as Europe is on the brink of war. Sally, a 30-year-old single mom, dreams of being the first European woman to cross the English Channel. While society and...

60 projects selected for the 30th edition of the industry meet.

IDFA Forum, the co-production and co-financing market of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, has selected 60 projects for its 2022 edition, including The Eternal Memory, a new feature from The Mole Agent director Maite Alberdi.

Produced by Alberdi’s Chilean company Micromundo Producciones and Pablo Larrain’s Chilean firm Fabula, the film is described by IDFA as “an intimate meditation on love and memory that observes a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s over a four-year period”.

Scroll down for the full list of IDFA projects

It is one of 22 projects in the market’s flagship Forum Pitch category,...

"Tpb Afk: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard," Simon Klose's documentary about the notorious Torrent site, will be getting a release across all broadband VOD platforms on Tuesday, March 12, courtesy of Filmbuff, the company announced today. The film, which had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, made its North American debut at SXSW last night on March 8. The film profiles the three founders of the Swedish file-sharing platform The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, looking at their philosophy, their legal issues and the criminal charges and $13 million infringement case with which they were charged. Read More: Watch Pirate Bay Documentary 'Tpb Afk' Online For Free (Of Course) In the announcement, Klose said, "I want to experiment with new digital tools without closing down the Internet. I feel strongly that an open library of cultural works can coexist with a blooming digital economy.

★★★☆☆ Founded in 2003 by "a couple of guys in a [internet] chatroom," peer-to-peer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was responsible for co-ordinating half of the world's bit-torrent traffic by 2009. With an estimated 22-25 million users downloading from the site at any one time, Tpb is clearly a principal player. It's claimed that major motion picture studios suffered $6.1 billion losses at the hands of piracy in 2005. That's the kind of thing that puts a trio of Swedish tech-geeks firmly in the sights of Hollywood's big guns. Their ongoing trial is the focus of Simon Klose's documentary, Tpb Afk: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013) (watch for free below).

Read more »...

A funny thing happened in the moments leading up to the Berlin International Film Festival world premiere of "The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard," a documentary about the prosecution of the titular Swedish file sharing site's founders. Minutes before the screening, director Simon Klose called a friend up in front of the audience and asked him to unlock a version of the movie uploaded to YouTube, appropriately setting the stage for a tale focused on internet freedoms. The lights went down; the screen lit up. But before "Tpb Afk" started, the same warning sign preceding all movies at the festival appeared. "Film piracy is illegal," it read, an inadvertent irony not lost on the majority of the room. Chuckles circulated. In a way, the story had begun before a single frame. At the root of "Tpb Afk" is a fundamental tension between conventional views on copyright law and the emerging standards of digitally savvy users.

It's only fitting that "Tpb Afk: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard," a documentary about Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm (who's currently in prison in Sweden), the founders of the notorious file sharing site and copyright lawsuit magnet The Pirate Bay, would end up online for free just as the film had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival today. It's all part of the plan for the film, which opened the festival doc section while simultaneously being posted onto YouTube as well as, of course, the site on which it's centered. Directed by Simon Klose, "Tpb Afk" was funded by a combination of Swedish government art grants and a $25,000 Kickstarter campaign. The film's also available for digital purchase and DVD pre-order here, and Klose, who released the film under a Creative Commons license, also plans to upload a remix-friendly version that doesn't include the four minutes of archive material in the.

Some of the best films of the 2012/2013 calender year from Richard Linklater, Harmony Korine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Andrew Bujalski, Jeff Nichols, David Gordon Green, Shane Carruth and Joshua Oppenheimer are among the headliner names for the 2013 edition of the South by Southwest Film Festival. With a little over 100 plus film line-up (a whopping 2000+ titles were submitted), almost 70 are world premieres: there is the highly anticipated sophomore film (that has been on our radar since it first went into production) with M. Blash’s (The Wait), Joe Swanberg who makes SXSW his second home will premiere Drinking Buddies, veteran indie filmmaker John Sayles saddles in with Go For Sisters, and rounding out the Narrative Spotlight section we’ve got The Bounceback from Bryan Poyser, Loves Her Gun from Geoff Marslett along with titles we thought might break into Park City, but found an Austin home instead with Jacob Vaughan’s Milo and...