Print the Legend was well-received in its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. While I was expecting a film focused on a new technology, the high tech elements and the implications of the technology were really secondary to exploring the world of high tech start-ups in this new and potentially revolutionary technology. The film did that very well. It focused on interviews with the employees at two startup companies, MakerBot and Form Labs. The film did an excellent job of describing the process of taking a company from being a shoestring startup to being a real company and the many bumps that the founders and employees hit along the way. The interviews are well- filmed and really showed the fascinating interactions between personalities and businesses including many of the founders were pushed out by intra-personal conflicts.
Although not mentioned directly in the film directly, an important issue raised in the Q&A was the degree to which the startups were overwhelming populated by white males. The subjects from the film that attended the screening indicated that they were concerned about the issue and were attempting to address it.
The inclusion of the creepy Austin-based anarchist Cody Wilson who caused an international controversy in 2012 by printing 3D guns added an interesting subplot – and some local color for the Austin audience. Wilson's bizarre efforts to print weapons raised serious questions about the ethical limits of the technology and forced the companies to seriously consider – perhaps for the first time – the moral implications of the technology were creating. This was an important element of the film, because it did move it beyond the metrics of success and profit into the realm of considering the societal impact of their work. Oddly, while Wilson was present at the post-screening Q&A, no one in the audience chose to ask him any questions. Perhaps, they just thought he wasn't worth engaging.
