“We Live in Public” Filmmaker’s Next Project Is the World of Web Start-Ups

Ondi Timoner, the documentary filmmaker whose “We Live in Public” — about voluntarily handing over our privacy online — won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2009, is back to train her cameras on the world of technology again.

Timoner is now filming a documentary about the world of social Internet start-ups, tentatively titled “<3 Startups.”

The idea behind the project is to portray “if Facebook was filmed from day one,” Timoner said (but this time, no screen time for the Winklevii!).

“I think more and more start-ups are looking at how can the online world really drive the physical world and improve our lives,” Timoner told me yesterday outside the Y Combinator Demo Day start-up presentations, where she and her Interloper Films crew were capturing the festivities.

“The underlying question of the entire series we’re making is: The Internet, will it free us or enslave us? Is it good or bad? And that depends on if people are good are bad,” she said.

Timoner said some of the companies and people she has already captured include New York messaging start-up Fast Society; Localmind, a location-based Q&A outfit which just relocated to San Francisco from Montreal; Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig of BetterWorks; and hacker and security researcher Samy Kamkar.