A magician’s hunt for the thieves who were privating his tricks and selling them online has been turned into a major documentary.

Andi Gladwin, who runs one of the world’s biggest online magic stores from his home in Gloucestershire, was alerted to his products being illegally sold in 2017.

Faced with his work being sold for “next to nothing”, he went on a journey to confront the thieves himself – a quest which ended up becoming the heart of the film Stealing Magic.

“It’s not really about the money – you don’t make a lot of money creating magic tricks – but it’s about this idea that when you spend your life creating something, somebody could just take it from you in a second,” he said.

As the owner of Vanishing Inc. Gladwin has spent his career developing his own magic tricks, writing books and creating products for fellow illusionists to use in their own shows.

Due to the issues with pirated material he said people had stopped selling their own tricks altogether.

“That’s bad for magic, that’s dangerous for our future in the creative arts,” he said.

“It’s important to me that someone should do something about it, and nobody was, so I thought maybe I would give it a go.”

His quest to find those responsible took him to Serbia, Belgium, France and Egypt, where he confronted them face-to-face.

His approach caught the attention of the owner of a video game development studio, Randy Pitchford, who suggested working with Gladwin to make a documentary about his work to track the thieves down.

Over the course of three years, Gladwin’s story became Stealing Magic, which premiered at one of America’s biggest film festivals – Tribeca – in June.

The experience of watching the film, he said, was “nothing like I expected”.

“You analyse every moment of it. I realise how crazy I am at times, how obsessive I am,” he said.

“But also it was good to know that other people believe in the same thing I believe in, because it’s reached a much wider network than I thought.”

While the film has received glowing reviews, Gladwin said he was most encouraged by the response of the likes of US lawmakers and computing experts who want to get involved in the issue.

His main message, he said, was encouraging “everybody to know they can do something”.

“If they have a problem in their art form or their industry that they actually can speak up and they can create change,” he said.

“I hope that they do, and I hope that’s what [the film] inspires.”

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