Sundance nomination for documentary on ‘paedophile hunters’

A new film focusing on the controversial practice of ‘paedophile hunting’, which extensively features Professor Mark de Rond of Cambridge Judge Business School, premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in the ski resort of Park City, Utah, where it was nominated for US Best Documentary.

The film, Predators, focuses on the legacy of the controversial NBC Dateline television series To Catch a Predator, which created the template for paedophile hunters in the UK and elsewhere, making it a popular form of citizen activism. 

In the film, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning film maker David Osit subverts expectations about To Catch a Predator and its ilk as well as question the morality and purpose of his own film. He asks: How are we complicit by consuming true crime programmes, or documentaries about them, which trade in public humiliation and schadenfreude as popular entertainment? 

Embedding with paedophile hunters for an academic paper and a book 

Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography at Cambridge Judge, has for many years studied the issue of paedophile hunting, and this research drew the filmmakers to his expertise. Mark was embedded for 4 years with paedophile hunters in the UK, and his findings were published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2022. He won top honours in the Academic Research category of the Financial Times 2024 Responsible Business Education Awards for best business school impactful academic research addressing societal challenges. 

A new book by Mark based on these 4 years – Dark Justice: Inside the World of Paedophile Hunters – will be published in early March by Cambridge University Press. 

US television programme that was cancelled after a suicide 

The 99-minute film focuses on the rise and fall of the TV programme, in which paedophile hunters lured alleged child predators to a filming site where they would be interviewed and often arrested.  

The programme began airing in 2004 and was cancelled in 2008 following the suicide of a man caught exchanging photos with a sting operator posing as a 13-year-old boy. Sundance describes the film as “an exploration of the scintillating rise and staggering fall of the show and the world it helped create”. 

Professor Mark de Rond’s role in the film 

Sundance has long been a major launching pad for independent films. The festival is described by Robert Redford, the actor-director who is the Sundance Institute Founder and President, as “steadfast in its commitment to elevating unique and urgent voices in independent storytelling”. 

Among the reviews of Predator’s premiere at Sundance describing Mark’s contribution to the film: 

• Collider: “The soothing, pondering interviews with de Rond make up the heart of the documentary and its approach. Predators has no answers, only questions. But de Rond’s gentle musings are a welcome antidote to the extreme and absolute nature of To Catch a Predator (and a reminder that this world isn’t completely devoid of empathy). […] The interviews with Mark de Rond help to ground the film and allow it to ruminate on its ideas.” 

• The Guardian: “To Catch a Predator relied on ‘fantasy co-created with the show, where kids are hyper-sexual and available’ to lure its targets, says Mark de Rond, an ethnographer who has researched To Catch a Predator-esque efforts in the UK. “As De Rond notes, ‘understanding is not the goal on the show.’” 

• Variety: “When you show these men as human beings, the show kind of breaks down,” observes one of the film’s recurring talking heads, Cambridge ethnographer Mark de Rond. For To Catch a Predator, dehumanisation was the easier, grabbier approach, and the less controversial one — at least until an infamous incident in the final series, where a botched sting culminated in the suicide of the perpetrator, a Texas assistant DA, as cops and cameramen closed in.” 

On the film maker David Osit 

Director-Producer David Osit is known for the 2020 film ‘Mayor’ about the mayor of Ramallah in the West Bank, which won a Peabody Award and an Emmy Award, and the 2015 film ‘Thank You for Playing’ about the development of the video game ‘That Dragon, Cancer’, the story of a family raising a son diagnosed with cancer, which won an Emmy Award and was nominated for 3 such awards. Other Producers of Predators are Jamie Gonçalves and Kellen Quinn.