The Six Billion Dollar Man film review — the trials of Julian Assange and the price on his head

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Films about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have virtually become a documentary sub-genre in their own right — examples including Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, Laura Poitras’s Risk, and Kym Staton’s recent The Trust Fall. Now arrives another: The Six Billion Dollar Man. It may not include a huge amount that is unfamiliar, but it stands out in being comprehensive and up to date, tying up loose threads in the story while also following the odd new avenue that merits further exploration.

Directed by American documentarist Eugene Jarecki — whose work includes Why We Fight and The House I Live In — this serious-minded account has a teasing title that refers to an alleged international deal between two governments, essentially the price on Assange’s head.

Jarecki gives us the long build-up to WikiLeaks’ coming to public notice and to its founder becoming a revered and reviled international figure. But the body of the film concerns Assange’s sojourn over nearly seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, his fortunes as a favoured guest very much turning with the change of that nation’s government. Several contributors — including Nils Melzer, former UN special rapporteur on torture — testify to the extremity of Assange’s experience there and, later, under detention in the notoriously tough HM Prison Belmarsh. The subject’s wife, human rights lawyer Stella Assange, calls his overall experience “a very slow-motion public execution”.

Running through the film is a narrative thread involving a young Icelandic man, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, who joined WikiLeaks as a teenage volunteer, admits embezzling from the organisation, and agreed to be an informant for the FBI. The only interviewee who comes across nearly as badly is former Conservative minister Alan Duncan, who smirkingly chirrups, “Job done!” at the memory of Assange’s eventual arrest.

Other contributors include lawyer Jennifer Robinson, from Assange’s defence team, whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pamela Anderson (one of several celebrities who befriended Assange during his seclusion) and the pseudonymous “Cat-Cat”, a former security operative at the embassy, who attests that he was paid to spy on Assange.

Jarecki focuses on Assange’s career and experiences, rather than offering another character portrait of the man; and the film certainly does not whitewash him, one reporter saying that Assange “can be arrogant, even cruel”. There is also due attention paid to the allegations of sexual misconduct made against him in Sweden, suggesting that these too were used in a wider international campaign to discredit him.

However, the film is altogether unsensationalistic and commendably low on rhetoric. One of the few splashes of that comes from Assange himself, heard early in the film warning that we are heading towards “a state of permanent war . . . a total surveillance society” — and what Jarecki reveals about his ordeals seems very much to bear that out.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from December 19