Stealing Magic delves into a cat-and-mouse game involving illusionists who travel the world to find the people stealing their tricks online

The premise to one of the best films of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival sounds more like an imaginative feature than a real-life documentary: When a group of anonymous online thieves steal highly coveted magic tricks, two illusionists travel the world and put their lives in danger to reveal their tactics and names. Imagine The Bourne Identity as directed by Penn and Teller and you’ll start to get a sense of Stealing Magic, an incredible, mysterious, sometimes absurd, sometimes deadly serious doc.

Andi Gladwin is a magician who also owns and operates his own website that sells magic tricks from other magicians. He suddently starts to see the exact tricks being sold on a bootleg website for a fraction of the cost, leading him to a near-obsessive quest to figure out what the hell is going on. In an insular world like this one, Matthew Testa’s film shows how some magicians have to give up their careers over the site since they literally can’t afford to sell their tricks (not to mention the immense time it takes to create new ones.)

“The average creator may only really make two or three thousand dollars per trick, and bear in mind those tricks typically take a good few years to create,” Gladwin says in the exclusive clip below. “There really isn’t that much money in it, and I think that’s why most creators do it for the love of it.”

Gladwin and magician George Luck discuss how they first reached out to the bootleg site to try unsuccessfully to get them to take the site down. The response back, Luck says, “was extortion,” with the site owners asking for $25,000 a month in bitcoin. “This was scary,” Luck says in the clip, “because maybe that’s how much money they’re making from our products every single month.”

Testa’s film blends the suspense of a cyberheist film with an incisive portrait of Gladwin, whose near-pathological obsession with finding the culprits rides the razor-thin line between nobility and potentially life-threatening danger. But as Gladwin notes in the clip, the stakes for the tight-knit community couldn’t be higher. “The whole future of magic,” he says, “is definitely at stake because of piracy.”