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There are many movies you can watch about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, including a novel or two.What makes Kim Staton's documentary particularly urgent The Fall of Trust: Julian Assange Its subject is that his subject spent almost five years in Belmarsh Crown Prison and is currently seeking leave to appeal against extradition to the United States.
The film strongly emphasizes the impact of Assange's plight on press freedom, offering an impassioned, if not always carefully argued, defense of his work as a journalist. It highlighted in particular the so-called “collateral murder” footage released by WikiLeaks showing a US helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 that killed several unarmed people, including two Iraqi Reuters journalists.
Staton collected testimonies from numerous Assange supporters, colleagues and family members; including former UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer and late Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ayers Daniel Ellsberg, whose exposure of U.S. policy in Vietnam set a notable precedent for Assange's work.
We also hear from the late John Pilger, whose journalistic prominence the film relies too heavily on. Celebrities who have narrated intermittently include Susan Sarandon, singer MIA and former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters, and today, They are no longer the most famous debaters, and their dark, harsh mutterings (“What if everything we thought we knew about someone was a lie?”) introduce an angry tone that doesn't help the argument at all.
Amid some of the dense, content-heavy content, there's also a lot of irrelevant weirdness: campy animations, odd digressions that trace the tradition of free speech back to the Stone Age, and some empty concluding rhetoric (“We're in a single piece of content United “A Community of Destiny”). The vaguely titled article is less a thoughtful documentary than an unedited advocacy statement. Staton's film passionately defends journalism, But closer in style to the Lectures Corner pamphlet.
★★☆☆☆
Now in the cinema
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