PARK CITY, Utah — This month marks the first anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz, the Internet open-access activist. Swartz, then 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment as he faced the possibility of 35 years in prison for downloading scholarly articles from JStor through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer servers. His alleged motivation: making them available for free to the public. A new film, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” one of a dozen documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival here this month, chronicles Swartz’s hyperproductive young life and explores why he chose to end it.

The film, directed by Brian Knappenberger, shows Swartz taking part in conversations on reimagining the Internet with MIT academics when he still needed a stool to reach conference room microphones. At 14, Swartz helped create RSS, a tool for subscribing to online information. He later helped develop the Creative Commons alternative to copyright; founded a company, Infogami, that merged with the popular website Reddit; and established the political action group Demand Progress. He believed that information should be equally accessible, that everyone has a right to benefit from the world’s intellectual heritage.

Swartz, the film says, was concerned about government mass surveillance long before Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents. In one clip, Swartz tells Russia Today, “It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax that they don’t even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.” He goes on to say, “If the answer is, ‘Oh, we’re spying on so many people we can’t possibly even count them,’ then that’s an awful lot of people.”

Knappenberger’s film, which sometimes borders on hagiography, argues that the government wanted to make an example of Swartz. The main prosecutor in the case, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, says, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar and whether you take documents, data or dollars,” In the film, we see how federal prosecutors created a situation for Swartz similar to Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” which depicts the turmoil of an individual, Josef K., caught in a labyrinthine bureaucracy, facing allegations that defy rational explanation. Swartz, who called the book one of his favorites, wrote on his blog in 2011, “It was precisely accurate — every single detail perfectly mirrored my own experience. This isn’t fiction, but documentary.”

In the film, we learn that Swartz had growing political ambitions and the prospect of being branded a felon for a crime he didn’t believe he had committed caused him great anguish. His friend Quinn Norton recalls his telling her, “They don’t let felons work in the White House.” Swartz meanwhile kept the nature of his problems secret from those closest to him, including his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. In the documentary, she recounts how Swartz only obliquely referred to his legal troubles, waiting until the last moment to tell her. She says he tried to protect his friends and family, not wanting to give anyone information that could warrant their being called as witnesses.

Near the end of the documentary, we’re introduced to 15-year-old Jack Andraka, who recently discovered a breakthrough, low-cost pancreatic-cancer test by reading free online academic articles much like those Swartz downloaded from JStor. Andraka told the Vancouver Observer that he relied on free articles because “in most online databases, articles cost about $35 and there are only about 10 pages ... I believe (Swartz’s) actions were mostly justified. The public funded a lot of that research. It shouldn’t be held inaccessible to the public.” The film asks, How many other Andrakas could make groundbreaking medical discoveries if a world existed where access to information is treated as everyone’s birthright? But how many more Swartzes will face legal repercussions — and the accompanying despair — that comes with fighting for such a world?