EXCLUSIVE: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been described at varied occasions by highly effective folks within the U.S. authorities as a spy, a “software of Russian intelligence,” and a “high-tech terrorist.”
However to filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, the right phrases for Assange are whistleblower, truth-seeker, and defender of the general public’s proper to know important details about their authorities’s conduct. Jarecki’s Oscar-contending documentary The Six Billion Greenback Man: Julian Assange and the Worth of Reality reevaluates the controversial determine whose web site uncovered surprising secrets and techniques, just like the “Collateral Homicide” video that confirmed U.S. army personnel in Iraq committing what can solely be referred to as warfare crimes.
The Six Billion Greenback Man opens in theaters within the UK and Eire on December 19 and in U.S. theaters in early 2026. We have now your first take a look at the movie within the trailer above.
L-R director Eugene Jarecki, Kathleen Fournier, Julian Assange, Stella Assange and Jennifer Robinson pose in the course of the ‘The Six Billion Greenback Man’ photocall on the Cannes Movie Pageant on Could 20, 2025.
Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis through Getty Photographs
“When the movie premiered at Cannes Movie Pageant this 12 months the place it received each the Grand Prize and a Golden Globe for Documentary, audiences had been shaken up by revelations that can make you query the whole lot you thought you already knew in regards to the Assange case,” Jarecki stated in an announcement. “However now, occasions have modified a lot and so quickly, that audiences see the movie as an pressing cautionary story about what exactly is going on to all of us proper now. We at the moment are witnessing a warfare on journalism and a warfare on fact itself.”
The movie options Julian Assange, his spouse Stella Assange, a rare interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden filmed in Moscow, Naomi Klein, Pamela Anderson, Alan Duncan, Daniel Ellsberg, Jen Robinson, Nils Melzer, Rafael Correa (former chief of Ecuador) and Sigurdur Thordarson. The Icelander Thordarson, often called “Siggi,” joined Wikileaks as a young person however within the movie emerges as considered one of Assange’s chief betrayers.
The Six Billion Greenback Man is being launched by Watermelon Photos. Producers are Kathleen Fournier and Eugene Jarecki; government producers are James Packer, Addison O’Dea, and Mathilde Bonnefoy.
Jarecki will discuss his documentary on Sunday at Deadline’s Contenders Movie: Documentary digital occasion.
At Cannes, we interviewed Jarecki within the Deadline Studio on the Croisette. Earlier documentaries, he famous, have been made about Assange and Wikileaks (by the likes of Oscar winners Laura Poitras and Alex Gibney), however his movie is the primary to trace the decision of the espionage case that at one level threatened Assange with a possible dying penalty.
“What we witnessed is about 15 years of going after Julian Assange to bury him and his group and finally the U.S. authorities was prepared to spend $6 billion to attempt to destroy him, which is what the movie actually reveals,” Jarecki defined in Cannes. “There was some very new proof that got here to mild, got here into our possession that we wished to share with the general public additionally.”
Julian Assange
Matthew Carey
Assange is now a free man, having struck a plea cut price with the American authorities that noticed him plead responsible to at least one rely of violating the U.S. Espionage Act. Seventeen different counts had been dropped, and the U.S. sought no additional jail time for him (Assange had spent over 5 years in jail within the UK on fees of violating bail situations by in search of asylum within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London).
Watch the trailer for The Six Billion Greenback Man above.
