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As “Mr. Robot” fans fall further down the rabbit hole that is season three of the techno-thriller, a new documentary unveils the real hackers who using digital means to topple governments, banks, and society. One of the most controversial films that played the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, “The New Radical” is a portrait of the founders of Dark Wallet, the bitcoin app that allows users to make purchases without leaving a digital fingerprint. It’s a chilling peak behind into the extremist techies, as you can see in the first full trailer.

Read More:‘The New Radical’ Review: This Bitcoin Documentary Is a Real-Life ‘Mr. Robot’ — Sundance 2017 Review

“In a very, I guess you could say ‘Jihadist’ way, I’m not afraid,” says Dark Wallet founder Amir Taaki in “The New Radical,” which explores the lives of various crypto-anarchists. Filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough focuses on the terrifyingly brilliant Cody Wilson,...

The New Radical is yet another timely, foreboding Sundance documentary with a fast-moving story that will surely benefit from a sequel. Directed with the energy of a Hollywood conspiracy thriller by Adam Bhala Lough, it tells the tale of Cody Wilson and friends. Famous for his YouTube channel Distributed Defense, Wilson cracked the formula for building a 3D-printed gun. Taking the second amendment to its extreme, even the NRA declines to offer support or even a formal comment on Wilson’s 3D-printed serial number-free Liberator Gun.

Following Wilson, once a law student at University of Texas at Austin and staunch libertarian, over the course of several years as 3D printing technology evolves, The New Radical offers a cinematic look at the kind of decentralized on-demand production that scares governments around the world. After cracking distributed defense, Wilson and British Iranian programmer Amir Taaki turn to crypto-currency, forming Darkwallet, marketed as...

A few decades ago, a show like “Mr. Robot” — which transforms modern fears of technological instability into suspense — might look like science fiction. These days, however, real life is almost as unsettling. Several recent documentaries on a growing community of hackers and acolytes focus on the developing momentum of a digitally enhanced landscape and the anarchistic tendencies that blossom within it: Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour” and her yet-to-be-released “Risk” follow the twin struggles of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, while Alex Winter’s “Deep Web” captured the plight of incarcerated dark web pioneer Ross Ulbricht.

Adam Bhala Lough consolidates the focus of these projects with the restless, scattershot approach of “The New Radical,” a portrait of the founders of Dark Wallet, the bitcoin app that allows users to purchase materials without leaving a digital fingerprint. Lough gives these troublemakers a dense platform to voice their extremist perspectives, but the movie primarily...

Conceived and created before the Presidency of Donald J. Trump, Sundance’s documentaries straddle one of the most profound cultural and political shifts in the United States’ recent history.

As the country is forced to grapple with a new range of issues in the post-Obama age, documentarians are also now straining to catch up. You could see it on the screen at Sundance, where last-act codas and recent news snippets suggested how the triumph of Trump had impacted, and in some cases, undermined the stories being told. The story of the election is explicitly told in “Trumped: Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time,” but even when Trump wasn’t presented, the country’s conservative turn—and the pain and fractures it has caused among many of its citizens—may influence the way these films are received and understood.

A People Divided

How are this year’s nonfiction stories,...