Cannes plays host to political fireball with Julian Assange doc The Six Billion Dollar Man | Canada Voices

Although Cannes organizers like to think their film festival is apolitical, “the festival is political when the artists are political,” festival director Thierry Fremaux said during last week’s opening news conference.

This year’s edition frequently resembles the world’s glitziest United Nations conference. U.S. President Donald Trump, the Israel-Hamas war, #MeToo, the corrupt regimes in Iran, Russia and Egypt – take your pick of sociopolitical crises and you’ll find it here in either the programming or the pomp.

But Wednesday night, Cannes played host to what might be one of the biggest, or certainly most divisive, political moments in recent festival history when it premiered The Six Billion Dollar Man. Directed by documentary vet Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger), the film follows the rise, imprisonment and eventual release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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Often incendiary in its narrative and featuring interviews with everyone from Edward Snowden to former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa (whose London embassy provided shelter to Assange for seven years), Jarecki’s film paints a glowing portrait of a righteous, if deeply flawed, man going against a political system that may already be too powerful to rein in.

The day before the film’s world premiere – which featured a surprise appearance by Assange – Jarecki sat down with The Globe and Mail in Cannes to talk about bringing the world to La Croisette.

This film was scheduled to premiere at Sundance in January, but then you pulled it in late December over “unexpected developments.” What happened?

What changed was the [June, 2024] exoneration of Julian Assange, with the United States dropping 17 of the 18 rather frivolous charges, which no legal experts thought ever had any merit. We started making a film that was meant to examine the case against him from all sides, and come to an understanding of whether there was a massive injustice going on in his incarceration or not.

I had thought with some hubris that I could get it all done by the end of the year, but I couldn’t. And with the election of Donald Trump, I realized you couldn’t just button this up quickly.

The other reason was that Julian could appear in the film, perhaps. And the third reason is that the thing about premiering the film in America, while I’m loyal to Sundance, I’d be premiering it in a country that Julian cannot enter.

We don’t hear from Assange much in the film, though – only toward the very end, and briefly. Is there going to be a new cut after Cannes?

You do hear from him, as much as I felt was important and necessary. I think Julian has been muzzled for so long that if he chooses to say certain things, I’m happy to share that with the public. But at the same time, it’s also what he has done with his life, which, I think, speaks for itself.

Before you were working on this film, how much knowledge did you have of the sexual assault allegations against Assange? Did that present any kind of trepidation for you in going into this project?

I had heard that Julian had tried to rig the election for Donald Trump. I heard that Julian was a Russian asset. I’d heard many things, and it’s my job to try to get at the facts and get past what often is sort of a theatre of the absurd, a theatre of distraction. In this case, what we found is that Julian was extremely mischaracterized, in many cases, by choreographed information.

We looked very closely at the truth, and had I found that Julian was guilty of sexual crimes in Sweden, I would have had to report that. Instead, what I found from people as high as the head of the bar in Sweden was that they saw a miscarriage of justice.

And there are certain areas in the film where Assange is criticized for things that may have been excesses of one form or another. But they all seem to be the flaws you would see in any person.

Documentaries right now can be viewed as a tough sell to get distributed and get people watching outside the festival environment …

The truth hurts.

It does. But this one especially critiques the American system. How likely is this film going to find a home inside the U.S.?

This will sound ironic, but I don’t mean it ironically. I’m sure that there are distributors, streamers and media corporations out there who recognize that “truth” is the basis of American democracy, and if they start dancing with the devil of avoiding truth and oppressing truth, then they themselves will lose.

I believe deep in the hearts of people who work at these major corporations that bring us our media, they know deep down, too, that it is fundamental to hold a mirror to the affairs of the government and corporations.

I’m not going to make a joke and say the distributors will be climbing over themselves to acquire this. But I think we will find a home, because people there know deep down that they can’t look at themselves in the mirror if they’re not making content like this reach the public.

Bringing a film like this to Cannes might, in another year, stick out as a political sore thumb. But this year, it seems to be just one of many films addressing the current political climate.

Kudos to the festival for that development, in particular Thierry Fremaux. You know, the French have always had this kind of big brother relationship to America – we took our revolution cues from it.

They were right on Iraq, and here we are again, with an American administration hurtling the world into a very dangerous cocktail of fascism, corporatism, just basic inhumanity.

For Cannes to support a film like this, and to support some of the other films here, like Raoul Peck’s Orwell documentary, and the film [Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk] about the Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, who was just murdered, those films are major steps for Cannes.

This interview has been condensed and edited.