Cannes Is Rolling Out the Red Carpet for One of This Century’s Most Controversial Figures
Although the Cannes Film Festival is the world’s most prestigious movie showcase, its spotlight rarely falls on nonfiction film. Years go by without a single documentary competing for its biggest honor, the Palme d’Or, and there is no separate documentary prize. Juliette Binoche, the president of this year’s jury, devoted part of her opening-night remarks to Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after it was announced that her documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would be premiering at Cannes. But the film itself was slotted into a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.
The festival did, however, roll out the red carpet for The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki’s portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which premiered out of competition on Wednesday evening. The movie arrived with an extra jolt of attention thanks to the fact that it was originally planned to debut at Sundance, before Jarecki withdrew the film, saying he needed more time to incorporate “unexpected developments.” (Earlier this week, he said he was referring to the aftermath of Assange’s release from prison in June 2024.) Assange himself was there to be photographed, and, while not eligible for a Palme, Jarecki received a newly created documentary award from the Golden Globes, awarded by a four-person jury and delivered by Tessa Thompson.
Jarecki didn’t interview Assange after his release, explaining that he “didn’t think stuffing a microphone in Julian’s face was dignified.” But the movie doesn’t need Assange’s voice to take his side. Jarecki addresses some of the criticisms lodged against Assange, that he could be arrogant in personal interactions and cavalier in his handling of classified information, as well as the allegations lodged against him for sexual assault and violations of the Espionage Act. But they tend to be dismissed almost as soon as they arise, in some cases more compellingly than others. In the case of the assault investigation brought against him in Sweden, the movie argues that the two women only agreed to pursue charges after being convinced to do so by Swedish authorities, and mainly wanted to compel him to take an HIV test. (It is clear, at the very least, that neither woman wanted to repeat the experience of having sex with him; one described him as “the world’s worst screw.”)
As for the document dump that revealed members of the Democratic National Committee had made a concerted effort to ensure Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential nomination and Bernie Sanders did not—and which may well have played a key role in swaying the election against her—the movie outlines a compelling case for Assange’s personal bias against Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump, who seemed to be his best chance for a presidential pardon. But, using former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges as its closer, that section of the film ends with an argument embraced by both transparency advocates and the surveillance state: If they weren’t doing anything wrong, they would have nothing to hide. In any case, Assange rebuffed Trump’s demand to reveal the source of the DNC leak, and went back to being an official enemy of the state.
The Six Billion Dollar Man presents a compelling affirmative argument for the importance WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which the late media critic Danny Schechter refers to as “a bomb dropped on the official history of the United States.” The “collateral murder” video released in 2010 showed U.S. troops killing unarmed civilians, including journalists, in Iraq, breaking a story that traditional media outlets had been trying and failing to crack. And it seems indisputable that governments wanted him silenced, and were willing to bend their own laws in whatever ways they deemed necessary to do. He spent seven years in a single room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London until his asylum was abruptly revoked and he was dragged out into the street, looking bedraggled and broken. Because the U.S. couldn’t charge Assange with publishing classified documents without running afoul of traditional journalistic institutions, the FBI used the testimony of an Icelandic informant and former WikiLeaks intern to assert that Assange was guilty of the less complicated crime of “conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense information,” for which he was convicted and served the maximum five-year term. Sigurdur Thordarson, or “Siggi the hacker,” as he prefers to be known, appears periodically throughout the film, mentioning his multiple convictions for soliciting sex from minors, or the time he shot a friend on-camera to check the effectiveness of his bulletproof vest. But it’s not clear why Jarecki keeps cutting back to him until Thordarson finally reveals that he never actually witnessed Assange committing a crime, although he can’t explain why he told the FBI he had. It’s a strangely inconclusive climax for a movie that trumpets the power of revelation but makes few of its own.
Although The Six Billion Dollar Man acknowledges that Assange has flaws, the opening credits, which not only reference Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg but the Salem witch trials and Emile Zola’s “J’accuse,” place the movie’s subject in a long line of martyrs, which leaves little room for exploring personal shortcomings. The best documentary I’ve seen at Cannes, political or otherwise, is Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, which interweaves a personal portrait of the author with a wide-ranging exploration of how his ideas are playing out in the current world. Ending with a picture of Orwell and his Indian nanny, the movie’s approach is justified by two of Orwell’s ideas in particular: that a person’s politics can only be explained by examining their origins, and that you can only truly hate imperialism if you are a part of it.As the product of a “lower-upper-middle-class” family that strove to be seen as landed gentry without possessing any land of their own, Orwell understood the workings of the ruling class without access to them, which sharpened his sense of the world’s inequities. Peck interweaves footage from recent struggles around the world, from Ukraine to Gaza to Myanmar, paralleling the current rise of fascism with the one Orwell fought against in Spain in the 1930s, and the one he envisaged in 1984, which he wrote as he was dying of tuberculosis.
Peck’s approach can be sprawling to a fault, taking on so many subjects and so much horror that the movie is overwhelming in more ways than one. But he has a keen eye for repeated patterns, a sense that the arc of history is more like a corkscrew. When he juxtaposes shots of contemporary dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, you’re just waiting for the inevitable punchline about Donald Trump, but instead he cuts back to George W. Bush, using the onset of the Iraq War as the moment when American doublespeak truly took hold. (Trump shows up plenty, of course, including a hard cut from cries of “Long live Big Brother” to the 2024 Republican National Convention.)
The former Haitian minister of culture, Peck, who also directed the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, is also one of the most incisive and politically incendiary filmmakers working today, and Orwell: 2+2=5 may be his widest-ranging and most ambitious work. (It’s also the first movie I’ve seen to make intelligent and purposeful use of generative A.I.) It’s dazzling and terrifying, a guide to a political movement that has been gathering steam for decades and shows no signs of letting up. It’s also a profoundly pessimistic movie, but it’s galvanizing in its understanding that the struggles we now face have been fought before, and some of them were won.
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