Latest news with #WikiLeaks
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
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.
Times
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
The Six Billion Dollar Man review — a gripping portrait of Julian Assange
'Why don't we just kill this guy?' That's what this gripping and persuasive documentary about Julian Assange alleges Donald Trump asked CIA officials while president in 2017, after Assange's WikiLeaks released a huge amount of data about Vault 7, an extensive CIA hacking programme. They didn't pursue that route, of course, and Assange is now a free man, who attended the world premiere of the film at Cannes, raising his fist to sustained applause after the credits rolled. Some still believe that Assange's organisation endangered people with its leaks, and that he has acted appallinglytowards women. But the facts are that the charges of sexual assault against two women in Sweden — which had resulted in Assange claiming asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Straight-Ahead Julian Assange Doc Looks Pessimistically Toward a Post-Truth World
The saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dragged on long enough, and complicatedly enough, to render a number of past films about him, if not obsolete, clear period pieces. Documentaries like Alex Gibney's 2013 'We Steal Secrets' and Laura Poitras' 2016 'Risk,' both produced during the Obama era, are informed by a very different political climate from the one we're in now — while neither could have anticipated how the Australian editor and activist's legal difficulties would escalate in the years to come. (Bill Condon's technothriller-styled 2013 Assange biopic 'The Fifth Estate,' meanwhile, felt premature from the get-go.) With Assange finally freed last year after 12 years of confinement or outright imprisonment in the U.K., the time feels right for an expansive catch-up on the whole knotty affair: Enter Eugene Jarecki's plainly presented but detail-packed documentary 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' which premiered at Cannes (with Assange himself present) in the festival's Special Screenings program. Beginning with the founding of initially modest startup WikiLeaks in the mid-2000s and the swift impact of its uncompromising journalism in media and political spheres alike, the film progresses in mostly linear fashion through attempts by various national administrations to stymie and silence Assange, and concludes with his 2024 return to Australia after five years in a high-security British prison, following a successful plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. There hasn't been another running news narrative quite like Assange's, in which secondary players range from Donald Trump to Pamela Anderson to a sociopathic teen hacker from Iceland: There's potential here for grandstanding, but Jarecki tells this tall true story with the same probing, drily enraged authority he brought to his 2005 military-industrial complex doc 'Why We Fight' or 2012's drug-war study 'The House I Live In.' More from Variety Paul Mescal Says Movies Are 'Moving Away' From 'Alpha' Male Leads, Calls It 'Lazy and Frustrating' to Compare 'History of Sound' to 'Brokeback Mountain' RAI Cinema Chief Paolo Del Brocco on Selling 'Heads or Tails' in Cannes and a New Victor Kossakovsky Doc Made With Italian Botanist Stefano Mancuso (EXCLUSIVE) 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere As a work of journalism itself, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' is a methodical assemblage of known facts rather than a revelatory investigation — though it may be an eye-opener to younger viewers who were less tuned into the news 15 years ago, and have become accustomed to a far more crowded and factionalized online media landscape than the one that gave rise to WikiLeaks in the first place. Formally, it's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction filmmaking, alternating archival footage — including, most interestingly, claustrophobic video from Assange's seven-year asylum in Ecuador's cramped London embassy — with talking-head contributions from an ensemble of Assange's associates, peers and journalistic descendants. The most offbeat stylistic imposition here is a series of tonally loaded chapter headings that begin with a 'Star Wars' theme ('A New Hope,' 'The Empire Strikes Back') before the conceit is oddly dropped two entries in. ('Return of the Jedi' would be a tough one to shoehorn into the subject at hand, admittedly; 'The Phantom Menace' less so.) Among the interviewees is cultural commentator Naomi Klein, who explains how WikiLeaks grew out of an early, more idealistic incarnation of the internet, prior to the rise of social media, in which its primary purpose was to make information available to all, for free. Many of the site's early journalistic coups — notably the damning 'Collateral Murder' video showing civilians and Reuters journalists being killed in U.S. airstrikes on Bagdad in 2007 — made waves by exposing unjust or corrupt acts by those in power. Yet the fallout from such scoops often shifted to shooting the messenger instead, as the U.S. government in particular sought to paint Assange as a criminal for refusing to overlook their errors in judgment. 'When we've been lied to, would we rather not know?' asks famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in championing Assange's work. Snowden frames the question rhetorically, though as the film reaches the Trump era of fake news and bad-faith far-right propaganda, Jarecki grimly concludes that many people prefer a lie they can agree with to the truth. It's that cultural turn in the weather that hastened and worsened Assange's downfall, triggered by a pair of rape charges in Sweden — into which the alleged victims admit they felt railroaded by police. It was Assange's very real concerns about being extradited to the U.S., however, that saw him improbably seek refuge in the aforementioned Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, too, is subject to changing cultural tides: The film's title refers to the amount offered in 2019 by the Trump administration to a new, more allyship-inclined Ecuadorian government to give him up. Cue five years' incarceration instead, much of it solitary, in the U.K.'s notoriously punishing Belmarsh prison — where, insists UN human rights expert Nils Melzer, he was subjected to sustained psychological torture, and emerged as a frailer, more anxiety-ridden man for the experience. (Perhaps this is partly the reason for Assange's own limited first-hand presence in Jarecki's film.) Fighting his corner all the while is dogged Australian human rights lawyer Jen Robinson and Stella Moris, another loyal member of his legal team, who eventually became Assange's wife, and mother to two of his children. Their personally colored interviews lend a more intimate dimension to a film that often, not inaccurately, presents Assange as a larger-than-life cause célèbre — an emblem of straightforward truth-telling principles at a time when AI, political spin and stubborn bigotry are allowing many media consumers to choose their own reality. 'We have given up on the idea that facts matter,' sighs Klein, while Assange closes 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' with an admission of the compromise that finally got the U.S. government off his case: 'I'm not here because the system worked, I'm here because I pled guilty to journalism.' 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