After 2005’s Why We Fight (on the military-industrial complex), Reagan (2011) and The King [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film] (2017), to name but a few of his often politically charged works, acclaimed US documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki presents the US-German co-production The Six Billion Dollar Man [+leggi anche:
intervista: Eugene Jarecki
scheda film], a comprehensive account of the Julian Assange case that premiered at Cannes, and is set to hit British and Irish theatres on 19 December, courtesy of Charlotte Street Films and Watermelon Pictures.

The film, produced by US- and German-based company Charlotte Street Films, is in many ways an observation of the story from a European vantage point. “My team had to relocate to Berlin to make the film because it was too dangerous to make it in the USA,” Jarecki explains. “We were in possession of evidence and material that could have been seized by US or UK authorities, had we been working in those countries.”

Cineuropa: As it stands, The Six Billion Dollar Man seems to be recounting the Julian Assange case as a now-concluded episode that needs to be told because it deserves a place in history, and yet there's an urgency to it that can be felt throughout.
Eugene Jarecki: I think a movie like this, which tells how this slope away from democracy got so slippery, seems not even like history, but rather like an annotation of current events. [...] The project actually started five years ago, when Assange was still in prison, and we were following a very fast-moving story, as if we were chasing a hurricane – or what turned out to be, effectively, an international spy thriller with more twists and turns, and more pin-you-to-your-seat thriller qualities than any Hollywood movie I've ever seen, just coming from a documentary. It wasn’t clear at the outset that's what was happening. We came into possession of some rather staggering information about the Assange case, particularly about the lengths the USA had gone to to destroy not just Assange, but also the public's very human right to know what is happening in our world. So, when we started to see the behind-the-scenes reality of what had happened, and when the people who had done the dirty work of going after Assange and WikiLeaks, and of manipulating the public's understanding of the story, started to come out of the shadows to talk to us, we suddenly found ourselves in a real-life Hollywood thriller.

When Edward Snowden made his revelations, he was aware of the risk that, rather than what he had to say, he could become the story. It feels like this is what happened to Assange: the disproportionate nature of the manoeuvres deployed against him is quite dizzying.
My goal was to make a movie about the many people who were involved in this international spy thriller. Assange, in a way, is almost not a character; he’s like an avatar in the background. When you think of the Pink Panther movies, you never really see the Pink Panther... Julian Assange is like a black diamond hovering in the background of this story, and everyone is engaged in machinations around him. [...] Part of why I avoid trafficking in the sensationalism of personalities is because that's just the bread and circuses that this empire is feeding us, to distract us from the real forces that are shaping our lives and the real issues that we need to be talking about: war, climate change, poverty, the future of technology, the incredible power that an elite few have over the masses on this Earth, and the fact that cannot be squared with any belief in democracy and it will not allow us to survive as a species, to say nothing of the millions of species we will take down with us.

The concerned viewer tends to feel rather powerless, seeing how major efforts to inform the people were in fact successfully stifled. It feels a bit like it was all in vain.
Henry Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the revolution, and Zhou Enlai said: “Too soon to tell.” So, it seems to me that as we watch historical events unfold in real time, we may not see the changes that are being made around us and from within us [...], but just because you don’t see it in your feed, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Edward Snowden's daring to let his moral compass be louder than the fear he might’ve felt, and the risks Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning took to inform the public [about how] institutions embroiled in mongering Turbo capitalism compromise the public good for private gain: that’s the kind of thing that, in the moment, might even have a reverse effect, as there might be a bigger clampdown because of what they’ve done, but in the long term, they’ve scored an incredible goal against the powerful, and against the technique used by the powerful to keep us all stupid. If these actions weren't effective, the government wouldn’t have come after them in the way they did.