Julian Assange returned to the international stage at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, first standing before the global press wearing a T-shirt with the names of children killed in Gaza before donning a tuxedo to walk the red carpet with the team behind “The Six Billion Dollar Man.”
Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the firebrand doc shares rarely-seen footage from inside the Ecuadorian embassy while building on eyebrow-raising revelations connecting Assange’s embassy surveillance to the late-billionaire and profligate Trump donor Sheldon Adelson. At the same time, the doc also shares a more up-close-and-personal – if not quite cuddly – side to a man Jarecki likens to “a sphinx.”
“There’s a Cheshire Cat quality to Julian,” Jarecki told TheWrap. “He’s always kept people guessing, and a lot of that was strategic. He had to, especially when taking on the U.S. government. So, if you’re going to make a film about him, you can’t avoid reintroducing some gray areas of his humanity. He doesn’t come off as especially likable in the film, but he comes across as a full person. He deserves that.”
Indeed, with “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” Jarecki hopes to recalibrate Assange’s public image, painting a more fulsome picture of the Wikileaks founder.
“I’m not here to do counter-propaganda,” Jarecki explained. “I’m here to speak truth to power, especially after being subjected to a decade-plus of deeply choreographed state propaganda. It’s been very convenient for the U.S. to cast him as Dr. Evil. Bill Hader even parodied him on ‘SNL’ as this cartoon villain. That helped distract from the actual crimes he exposed.”
“We do that to anyone we find inconvenient,” he continued. “We target the person. With Julian, it became about whether he’s a nice guy, how he treated his cat at the embassy, whether he has Asperger’s, whether he’s guilty of a crime in Sweden, even though he wasn’t even formally charged there. It’s classic propaganda, and can be very effective.”
The doc moves chronologically, following Assange from the earliest Wikileaks bombshells through his 12 years spent between the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the UK’s Belmarsh prison. And after emerging as an Obama-era champion of free speech, Assange’s liberal goodwill took a decisive nose-dive once pulled into the vortex of the 2016 presidential election.
Jarecki hopes to recalibrate that conception as well.
“In 2016, he proved he belonged to no party,” the filmmaker said. “That terrified people. He didn’t play the partisan game. And those who once praised him had to renounce him, because he disrupted their political narratives. But maybe that’s what made him most dangerous of all. He wasn’t playing for either team.”
“At the time, many thought Hillary Clinton was hurt by something linked to Wikileaks,” he continued. “Only what Wikileaks actually revealed was the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders, which led to resignations and exposed real election rigging. Assange later pointed out that if he were trying to gain favor with the powerful, leaking damaging info about the likely next president wouldn’t have helped him!”
While celebrating Assange’s release from prison and subsequent reunion with his wife and children, “The Six Billion Dollar Man” shares many testimonies from associates more pessimistic about the recent crack-downs on press freedoms – among myriad other concerns leading one interviewee to look into the camera offering this succinct analysis: “We’re f–ed.”
Does Jarecki believe that as well?
“If I believed that, I’d be in a bunker somewhere,” he laughed. “Yes, self-censorship is real. But so is resistance. Fires are burning around the world, with every day bringing more protests, uprisings and acts of solidarity. History shows you can’t silence people forever. People are waking up to the fact that injustice in one place affects everyone.”
“Whether you like him or not, Assange brought light, helping us see what was being hidden,” Jarecki said. “In a time when powerful tech and governments want to control the digital narrative, he flipped the script. And as Victor Hugo said, ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’”
The post With ‘Six Billion Dollar Man’ Doc, Eugene Jarecki Wants Julian Assange to Be Seen ‘As a Full Person’ appeared first on TheWrap.