Although the Cannes Film Festival is the most prestigious film showcase in the world, its projector rarely falls on a non -fictional film. Years go by without a single documentary in competition for its greatest honor, the Palme d’Or, and there is no separate documentary price. Juliette Binoche, the President of This Year’s Jury, Devoted Part of Her Opening-Night NOTIKS TO FATMA HASSONA, The Palestinian Photo Journalist who was KILLED IN AN ISRAELI AISTRIKE THE DAY After It WAS ANNOUNCED THAT Her Documentary Put your soul on your hand and walk would be first in Cannes. But the film itself was inserted into a low-profile side bar devoted to independent productions.
The festival, however, unrolled the red carpet to The man of six billion dollarsJulian Assange of Eugene Jarecki, the founder of the founder of Wikileaks, who was returned in competition on Wednesday evening. The film arrived with an additional attitude thanks to the fact that he was initially to make his debut in Sundance, before Jarecki removed the film, saying that he needed more time to incorporate “unexpected developments”. (Earlier this week, he declared that he referred to the consequences of the liberation of Assange de Prison in June 2024.) Assange himself was there to be photographed and, although he was not eligible for a palm, Jarecki received a newly created documentary award from the Golden Globes, awarded by a jury of four and awarded by Tessa Thompson.
Jarecki did not interview Assange after his release, explaining that he “did not think that the fodder of a microphone on Julian’s face was worthy”. But the film does not need Assange’s voice to take his side. Jarecki addresses some of the criticisms filed against Assange, that he could be arrogant in personal interactions and rider in his management of classified information, as well as the allegations filed against him for sexual assault and violations of the Espionage Act. But they tend to be rejected almost as soon as they arise, in some cases more convincing than others. In the case of the investigation into assault, submitted to him in Sweden, the film maintains that the two women only agreed to continue the accusations after being convinced to do so by the Swedish authorities, and mainly wanted to force him to pass a HIV test. (It is clear, at the very least, that no woman wanted to repeat the experience of having sex with him; one described it as “the worst screw of the world”))))
As for the discharge of documents which revealed that the members of the National Democratic Committee had made a concerted effort to ensure that Hillary Clinton won the presidential appointment of 2016 and Bernie Sanders did not – and which could well have played a key role in the swinging of the election against it – the film describes a fascinating case for the personal bias of Assange against Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump, who seemed to be his Best chances for presidential forgiveness. But, using the former New York Times journalist, Chris Hedges, it is closer, this section of the film ends with an argument adopted by the defenders of transparency and the surveillance state: if they did nothing wrong, they would have nothing to hide. In any case, Assange postponed Trump’s request to reveal the source of DNC’s flight and started to be an official state enemy.
The man of six billion dollars Presents a convincing affirmative argument for the importance of Wikileaks disclosure, which the media critic of the deceased Danny Schechter calls “a bomb that abandoned the official history of the United States”. The video of the “collateral murder” published in 2010 showed that American troops killing unarmed civilians, including journalists, in Iraq, breaking a story that traditional media had tried and not to crack. And it seems indisputable that governments wanted him to silence and were ready to fold their own laws in all the ways they considered it necessary to make. He spent seven years in a single piece of the Ecuadorian embassy in London until his asylum was suddenly revoked and was dragged in the street, looking and broken. Because the United States could not invoice Assange to publish classified documents without presenting itself against traditional journalistic institutions, the FBI used the testimony of an Icelandic informant and a former Wikileaks intern to affirm that Assange was guilty of the less complicated crime of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified national defense information”, for which at most of five years. Sigurdur Thordarson, or “Siggi the Hacker”, as he prefers to be known, appears periodically throughout the film, mentioning his multiple convictions for having asked for minors sex, or when he turned a friend to the camera to check the efficiency of his bulletproof vest. But we do not know why Jarecki continues to reduce it until Thordarson finally reveals that he has never seen Assange commit a crime, although he cannot explain why he told the FBI that he had. This is a strangely not very conclusive highlight for a film that deceives the power of revelation but that makes some.
Although The man of six billion dollars Recognizes that Assange has faults, open credits, which not only reference to the Pentagon Pentagon En Flot Daniel Ellsberg papers, but also to Salem witch tests and “I accuse” by Emile Zola, place the subject of the film in a long line of martyrs, which leaves little room to explore personal faults. The best documentary I saw in Cannes, politics or other, is that of Raoul Peck Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5who intertwines a personal portrait of the author with a vast exploration of the way in which his ideas take place in today’s world. Ending with an image of Orwell and his Indian nanny, the approach of the film is justified by two of Orwell’s ideas in particular: that a person’s policy can only be explained by examining their origins, and that you can really hate imperialism if you are part of it.
As a product of a “lower-mi-Class” family which tried to be considered a gender arrived without having a land, Orwell understood the functioning of the ruling class without access to them, which sharpened its sense of inequalities in the world. Peck interlaces sequences recent difficulties in the world, from Ukraine to Gaza to Myanmar, parallel to the current rise of fascism with that which fought in Spain in the 1930s, and that which he envisaged in 1984What he wrote when he died of tuberculosis.
Peck’s approach can be extended to a fault, taking so many subjects and so much horror that the film is overwhelming in more ways than one. But he has an attentive eye for repeated patterns, the feeling that the arch of history looks more like a corkscrew. When he juxtaposes photos of contemporary dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, you simply wait for the inevitable punchline on Donald Trump, but instead, he returned to George W. Bush, using the start of the war in Iraq as the moment when American Doublepeak really took the hand. (Trump shows a lot, of course, including a harsh cut in the cries of “Long Live Big Brother” to the National Republican Convention of 2024.)
The former Haitian Minister of Culture, Peck, who also directed the I’m not your negrois also one of the most incisive and politically incendiary filmmakers working today, and Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 Maybe his widest and most ambitious work. (It is also the first film I saw to make an intelligent and deliberate use of the generative AI) It is dazzling and terrifying, a guide of a political movement which has gathered for decades and shows no sign of relaxation. It is also a deeply pessimistic film, but it is galvanizing in its understanding that the struggles we are now confronted with have been fought before, and some of them were won.
