Latest news with #Assange
Daily Tribune
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Tribune
Chechen film, Assange documentary win prizes in Cannes
The first Chechen film to screen at the Cannes Festival won best documentary, while a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange picked up a special prize on Friday. Deni Oumar Pitsaev won the festival's Golden Eye award for his autobiographical documentary Imago, which follows the filmmaker after he inherits a small patch of land in the Pankisi valley in Georgia, across the border from Chechnya in southern Russia. During the two Chechen wars of 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, the region became a refuge for Chechen rebels and thousands of civilian refugees who crossed Georgia's porous mountain border to flee the conflict. Pitsaev — who grew up between Grozny, Saint Petersburg and Almaty, and is now based between Brussels and Paris — was also awarded a prize in the festival's Critics' Week section on Wednesday. US director Eugene Jarecki was awarded a special jury prize for his documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man, about Assange, who has been in Cannes to promote the film but has not yet spoken publicly. Assange has declined all interview requests, but the 53-year-old former hacker's wife, Stella Assange, said he had 'recovered' from his years in detention and would 'speak when he's ready.' Assange was released from a high-security British prison in June last year after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Imago' Wins L'Oeil d'Or Prize For Top Documentary At Cannes; Julian Assange Film Wins Special Jury Prize For l'Oeil d'Or 10th Anniversary
Imago, a documentary by Chechen-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev, won the L'Oeil d'or prize today, the top award for nonfiction film at the Cannes Film Festival. But it wasn't the only award presented by the jury. The Six Billion Dollar Man, director Eugene Jarecki's film about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, won a Special Jury Prize marking the 10th anniversary of the L'Oeil d'or prize. Both directors were on hand for the announcement at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. More from Deadline Thailand's Engfa Waraha & Dream Thanika Jenjesda Want 'Lady Bee' To Re-Define The Female Gaze In Thai Filmmaking - Cannes Studio Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews Bi Gan's 'Resurrection' Hits Cannes With 7-Minute Ovation At World Premiere 'I didn't expect at all,' Pitsaev told Deadline after receiving the award. He said it might prove challenging to get the metal Golden Eye trophy through airport security. 'I hope they will not see it as a weapon. I mean, you can hurt someone with that.' Assange joined Jarecki at today's announcement. He has been a free man for only a year, after reaching a deal with U.S. authorities that saw him plead guilty to a single count of violating the Espionage Act. Assange appeared to become emotional as he spoke at the L'Oeil d'or ceremony. He said his last previous public comment was made at the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe, which declared him to have been persecuted as a political prisoner. 'Now is a time of great erosion of norms, coming from the conflict in Ukraine,' he said, 'and especially from the assault on the people in Gaza, the massacre of people in Gaza and also in the West Bank.' He suggested the U.S. was absent in terms of supporting human rights and that Europe needed to fill the void. 'There doesn't appear to be any other grouping of countries or major power on the only planet we live in that will stand, will fight for those norms that we all realized were important after all.' Jarecki told Deadline he viewed the awarding of the L'Oeil d'or Special Jury Prize to his film as consistent with a politically firm stand taken by the festival. 'I do think this is a seismic development within the Cannes Film Festival, my movie aside,' he noted. 'Just the fact that you can feel the festival leaning into documentary much more than ever before, leaning into the serious issues that are flying around the world right now. If you look at what showed at the festival this year, the dedication of the festival to Fatima [Hassouna, a Palestinian photojournalist killed in Gaza], there's extremely important stuff going on. And I think the way the psyche of the festival has shifted, we need that… We need more and more people to step up and get concerned and get engaged. And I came here not knowing what to expect of that, of how a festival of poetry and fantasy and romance would be dealing with a modern era where we all have such grave concerns and they're leaning into it.' Pitsaev's film earlier won the Jury Prize at Critics Week, the Cannes sidebar. His film is set in a remote area of Georgia, a few kilometers from the border with Chechnya. 'When Déni inherits a small patch of land in the wild, beautiful valley of Pankissi, he sees a chance to finally build the house in the trees that he's dreamed of since he was a boy,' reads a synopsis of the film. 'But nothing in the rugged Caucasus is ever simple. Returning to a village just across the Chechen border where he was born – a place he barely knows – Déni stirs up old feuds, buried family dramas, and above all, the question everyone keeps asking: when, and with whom, is he finally going to get married?' In an interview in Cannes on Thursday, Pitsaev told us he came to Cannes not knowing how the film would be received. 'For the premiere, I felt a little bit naked in front of the public,' Pitsaev commented. 'It's so intimate. And when I was doing the film and especially in editing, it was difficult for me to watch myself and [decide] what to take out, what not to put in a film.' The L'Oeil d'or prize comes with a €5,000 award. Eligible films can premiere in Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out of Competition, Midnight Screenings and Special Screenings, Directors' Fortnight, Critics' Week, or the ACID sidebar. Julie Gayet, French actress and producer, served as Jury President for the L'Oeil d'or prize. Her fellow jurors included Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo; Frédéric Maire, Swiss director of the Cinémathèque suisse; Juliette Favreul Renaud, French producer, and Marc Zinga, a Congolese-Belgian actor. The L'Oeil d'or is a relatively new award in the Cannes pantheon, added only in 2015. It was created by SCAM, France's Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia. Previous winners of the award include documentaries that went on to earn Oscar nominations: Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania; Faces Places, directed by Agnès Varda and JR; For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, and All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen. Best of Deadline 'The Last of Us' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 'The Last Of Us': Differences Between HBO Series & Video Game Across Seasons 1 And 2 Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Cannes: Eugene Jarecki on Why ‘Six Billion Dollar Man' Subject Julian Assange is 'Probably Not Dr. Evil'
For over a decade, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been a lightning rod in the global debate over press freedom, transparency and the reach of U.S. power. From the release of the notorious 'Collateral Murder' video to his years-long exile inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange has been hailed as a journalistic freedom fighter and vilified as a national security threat. Now, with The Six Billion Dollar Man, director Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The House I Live In) turns his lens on what he calls 'the most consequential political prisoner of our time,' delivering a searing exposé that uncovers the staggering cost the U.S. was willing to pay to silence him. Jarecki's latest documentary is a cinematic pressure cooker — part investigative thriller, part legal procedural and part character study — that digs deep into the forces aligned against Assange. Featuring interviews with human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and never-before-seen footage from Assange's time inside the embassy, the film traces the evolution of a man from renegade online publisher to political martyr. At the core is a revelation worthy of any geopolitical thriller: A $6.5 billion IMF loan allegedly dangled by the Trump administration to pressure Ecuador into handing Assange over — a modern bounty to bury a dissident voice. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Wins Un Certain Regard Top Prize Who Really Took the Iconic "Napalm Girl" Photo? Director of New Doc Addresses the Controversy (Exclusive) Paris Court Finds Ringleader, Seven Others Guilty in 2016 Robbery of Kim Kardashian The Six Billion Dollar Man premiered as a special screening in Cannes Wednesday night, with Assange in the audience. It's already a multi-award winner, having received the first-ever Golden Globe Award for best documentary on Monday, and, on Friday, took the special jury prize of the L'Oeil d'or, or Golden Eye, awards, Cannes' documentary film honors. Jarecki, who has long chronicled abuses of American power, doesn't mince words. He describes the case as 'shattering,' a prism through which to examine how democracies betray their own ideals. In a discussion at the American Pavilion in Cannes, Eugene Jarecki spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about weaponized propaganda, the perils of truth-telling in the digital age and how a man once seen as 'Dr. Evil' by the U.S. government made it to the red carpet. What first drew you to the story of Julian Assange? It's a delight to bring Mr. Assange to the red carpet. It's probably the greatest achievement of my life, because it's so important that someone like Julian Assange, who was the target of so much deeply corrupt propaganda, is finally being seen in a different light. When we started, he was in Belmarsh Prison, Britain's Guantanamo Bay. The idea that this inmate would be here in Cannes, a free man, was unthinkable. We asked: Why is this man in jail? Recognized as a journalist by The New York Times, the Nobel prize committee, journalism outlets all over the world — and he's in a prison full of terrorists and violent criminals? We might have found he did something really bad. Maybe the propaganda is true. It was our job to get to the heart of it. Then the case became more startling, the evidence more shattering. Especially what it tells us about those in power — that they were willing to spend $6 billion as a bounty on a man's head. How do you think Julian Assange has been misrepresented in the mainstream narrative? The U.S. engaged in a vast smear operation against Assange. It involved allies like the U.K. and Sweden. He was given asylum by Ecuador under President Rafael Correa. Under his successor, the country was paid $6 billion to hurt Mr. Assange. Companies like PayPal and Visa stopped payments to WikiLeaks. I used to think they liked when we made transfers — don't they profit from that? All of a sudden capitalism went out the window. Allegations were spread that he had been guilty of a sexual offense in Sweden. We looked into that. There never was a sexual case. There was an inquiry, which was dropped. But nobody ever knows that. Once you say 'sexual this' or 'sexual that,' it follows someone for the rest of their life. The U.S. buried Assange in propaganda until someone who did that much for humanity either became unknown or had a black cloud over him. Saturday Night Live once did a bit with Bill Hader playing Assange as Dr. Evil. That sums up what the U.S. did to him. What's my job? I'm a documentary filmmaker. I didn't see Assange during the filmmaking process. He was in jail. I dealt with him as a public figure on my editing screen. I'm not going to present him as an angel, but he's probably not Dr. Evil. Your film presents a more positive image of Julian Assange than, for example, Laura Poitras did in her . In fairness to other filmmakers, the groundbreaking information just wasn't available to them. In our case, because he was in jail, he didn't have access to me, and I didn't have access to him, so my personal feelings didn't get in the way. I had 11 years of secretly-filmed surveillance footage from the embassy. I watched hundreds of hours and most of what I saw was that Assange is not what the public has been led to believe. His actions speak for themselves. He's had 15 years of detention. That speaks highly of a person, even if they're not great with their cat or lack social skills. If I had found evidence that he committed a sexual offense or violated people in war, I would have had to reflect that. But I didn't. What I saw was a single individual with a team of idealistic young people going up against a superpower. The film also shows how both Democratic and Republican administrations treated Assange as public enemy no. 1. You include the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton's emails. How do you respond to the allegation that you're doing Trump's bidding by supporting Assange and criticizing the Democrats? This answer has three parts. First, yesterday [May 19] was the 100th birthday of Malcolm X. We're at a festival featuring a film about someone who was killed after making a political film [Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona, featured in Sepideh Farsi's Cannes documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk]. These are people who are fearless in the face of danger. Assange is one of them. He doesn't stop when reasonable people would back down. When he was already in trouble, you'd think he'd want to curry favor with Democrats. Everyone believed Hillary would win. If he wanted to play it safe, he wouldn't have released what Hillary did to Bernie Sanders — which is all they released. Many people confuse that with Benghazi or the private server. That's propaganda. They didn't release that. WikiLeaks only published what Americans should want to know: that the Democratic nominee got there with blood on her hands. The DNC made it impossible for Bernie [Sanders] to compete. What kind of world would we be living in now if they hadn't buried him? Julian Assange did not do the politic thing. He didn't protect power. When Democrats lost, they said the Russians did it. America always has someone to blame — Russians, Muslims — to distract from what we do to overthrow democracy around the world. WikiLeaks was given that information. They didn't hack anything. The New York Times said what WikiLeaks did was newsworthy and correctly timed. And if they had Trump's tax returns, they would have released them. They're anti-power, not pro-Trump. We investigated every possible lead about Russian involvement. Every lead led back to Democrats' mouths. I found no evidence linking WikiLeaks to Russia, beyond Hillary calling it 'Russian WikiLeaks' on TV — a way of saying: I didn't lose because of me, I lost because someone took it from me. Dr. Evil and his friend in Russia. What did it take to get Julian Assange to Cannes, as a free man? The difficulty was for his legal team to beat the U.S. government. He's a free man because they won one of the most seismic victories in American law. The U.S. dropped 17 of 18 charges. He was facing 175 years. The last charge — the one he pled guilty to — was 'journalism.' He pled guilty to acting as a journalist under the First Amendment. But there's another law in America that goes against the First Amendment: the Espionage Act. And that's what they used. America pretended it was the seat of modern democracy. But now it's jailing a journalist. He got five years for that. And so he's here because they struggled to reach that outcome, and he emerged triumphant. I think Cannes is doing something extraordinary. The festival is more and more allowing politics into the curriculum, and I think that's beautiful. I'm proud to be a part of that. [Cannes Festival director] Thierry Frémaux and Christian Jeune [director of the film department] are really taking the festival in the right direction. And then we won a Golden Globe — the first for a documentary. That's empowering, not only for this film, but for all documentaries. It shows that Julian can be seen in a golden new light. What was the personal impact of this project on you as a filmmaker? It was a long process. That affected me — in my aging, in my politics, in how I work with people. I think some of the strategies I used, in managing a team, in handling messaging, in applying ethics — they're more advanced in my soul now than when I was younger. Julian taught me to stay in it for the long haul. He was in for 15 years. I spent four-and-a-half years on this. I salute his willingness to go to the wall for a cause. Seeing him here at the festival — he's a different person than I saw in the footage all those years. After everything, does the truth still matter? Fuck yes! Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
RTÉ News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Chechen film, Assange documentary win prizes in Cannes
The first Chechen film to screen at the Cannes Festival has won Best Documentary while a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has picked up a special prize. Déni Oumar Pitsaev won the festival's Golden Eye award for his autobiographical documentary Imago, which follows the filmmaker after he inherits a small patch of land in the Pankisi valley in Georgia, across the border from Chechnya in southern Russia. During the two Chechen wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2009, the region became a refuge for Chechen rebels and thousands of civilian refugees who crossed Georgia's porous mountain border to flee the conflict. Pitsaev - who grew up between Grozny, Saint Petersburg, and Almaty, and is now based between Brussels and Paris - was also awarded a prize in the festival's Critics' Week section on Wednesday. The American director Eugene Jarecki was awarded a Special Jury Prize for his documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man, about Assange, who has been in Cannes to promote the film but has not yet spoken publicly. Assange has declined all interview requests, but the 53-year-old former hacker's wife, Stella Assange, said he had "recovered" from his years in detention and would "speak when he's ready". Assange was released from a high-security British prison in June last year after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum. Jarecki said his film aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality make him a divisive figure. "I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," he said.
Express Tribune
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Assange unveils Cannes film
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has "recovered" from his years in detention, his wife told AFP, as a new documentary about him premiered at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday. Assange is at the world's biggest film festival to promote The Six Billion Dollar Man by American director Eugene Jarecki but is not yet speaking publicly. After posing for photographers on Tuesday wearing a T-shirt with the names of killed Gaza children, he reappeared Wednesday for the red-carpet screening wearing a black tuxedo. The 53-year-old former hacker has declined all interview requests, however, with his wife Stella Assange saying that "he'll speak when he's ready." But she was upbeat about his health and said he was already thinking about his next steps. "We live with incredible nature at our doorstep (in Australia). Julian's very outdoorsy. He always has been. He's really recovered physically and mentally," Stella, a Spanish-Swedish lawyer, told AFP. Assange was released from a high-security British prison last June after a plea bargain with the US government over Wikileaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London where he claimed political asylum. 'Right side of history' Award-winning director Jarecki said his film aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality make him a divisive figure. "I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," Jarecki told AFP. Anyone willing to trade years of their life for their principles, "I think you'd have to look at that person as having heroic qualities," he added. The film includes never-seen footage, including personal videos handed over by Stella, a Wikileaks lawyer who had two children with Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy. It also features testimony from people who helped spy on Assange, including an Icelandic FBI informant and a private security agent who said he installed bugs accessed by US security services in the Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's left-wing former president Rafael Correa, who offered Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, also attended Wednesday's screening. "I believe we were on the right side of history," he told AFP. Jarecki's film seeks to address criticism of Assange, notably that he endangered lives by publishing unredacted US documents which included the names of people who had spoken to American diplomats or spies. 'Complete fabrication' The film extensively features supportive figures, while giving little time to opposing views. Baywatch actor and Assange friend Pamela Anderson makes an appearance, as does American whistleblower Edward Snowden, and left-wing Greek ex-minister Yanis Varifakis who compares the Wikileaks founder to Greek god Prometheus. The film lays the blame for the publication of a trove of 251,000 US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks in 2011 on veteran investigative British journalist David Leigh, alleging he published the password to access the database. Leigh, who collaborated with Assange while working at the Guardian newspaper, told AFP he had never been contacted by Jarecki and he called the theory "a complete fabrication". "It was Julian and Julian alone who did it. He's been trying to find an excuse ever since," he said by phone. Jarecki also dismissed any links between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence services over the leak of Democratic Party emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election which embarrassed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. An investigation by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who probed alleged Russian interference in the 2016 vote, found evidence that Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic Party and passed the information to Wikileaks. The documentary also examines the role of Swedish prosecutors in starting a sexual assault investigation into Assange, concluding that there was no case to answer. Jodie Foster on leaving US Meanwhile, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Oscar-winning actor Jodie Foster told Reuters that she prefers to be outside the United States right now, citing better conditions in Europe's film industry as well as more freedom now that her children have grown up. Foster was in southern France for the premiere of A Private Life, a psychological thriller in which Foster assumes the role of a psychiatrist who tasks herself with investigating the death of her patient, played by Virginie Efira. The US-born actor, who won two Oscars for The Accused in 1989 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, had to speak in French only for the Cannes film that is screening out of competition. Foster, 62, began her career filming commercials at the age of 3 and has received numerous awards throughout her career, including an honorary Palme d'Or award from Cannes in 2021. "I'm really enjoying working outside the United States," she said, recalling how she is not as tied down to the US now as she was when her children were little and she had to stay close to home. Foster, who first came to Cannes as a 13-year-old when she starred in Taxi Driver, said working as a director in France was better than in the US because of more creative freedom. Blending genres, like director Rebecca Zlotowski does in Foster's new film, is very uncommon in the US, she said. Studios want a film to be either a thriller or a comedy, they don't want a mixture of the two, she said, whereas France allows the director to have more authority on such decisions. "That's the reason why filmmakers love to come here." In Europe, female directors also have had more opportunities compared with the US, said Foster, herself a director. "I'd only worked with one female director until a few years ago. Isn't that kind of amazing? After I've made 60 movies that I've barely ever worked with another woman?" she said. "Europe has always had a female tradition, or at least for quite a while. But in America, somehow that bias really took hold."
