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Eugene Jarecki on Bringing Julian Assange to Cannes With the Explosive WikiLeaks Documentary ‘The Six Billion Dollar Man’

Eugene Jarecki is bringing Julian Assange to Cannes for the premiere of "The Six Billion Dollar Man," his documentary about the WikiLeaks founder.

“The Six Billion Dollar Man” paints a sympathetic portrait of Assange, who remains controversial for his decision to publish everything from diplomatic cables to classified footage of airstrikes in Afghanistan that pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of the U.S. government and its allies. He’s compared to Prometheus in the film for having brought to people a kind of modern fire in the form of access to the real documents about what the most powerful country in the world was doing in the name of war. WikiLeaks had fiercely protected and guarded that material, and it was actually a journalist at the Guardian who foolishly wrote a book in which he gave to the public all it needed to crack that and get inside those documents and see the unredacted names.

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