The Trust Fall: Julian Assange film review — impassioned documentary about the WikiLeaks founder

There is no shortage of films you could watch to learn about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, including a fiction feature or two. What gives particular urgency to Kym Staton’s documentary The Trust Fall: Julian Assange is that its subject is currently seeking permission to appeal against extradition to the US, having spent almost five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Heavily emphasising the implications of Assange’s plight for press freedom, the film makes an impassioned if not always finely argued defence of him as a journalist. It particularly highlights WikiLeaks’ posting of the so-called “collateral murder” footage showing a US helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 that killed several unarmed people, including two Iraqi Reuters journalists.

Staton has mustered testimonies from numerous Assange advocates, associates and family members; they include Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the late Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower whose own exposure of American policy in Vietnam represents a notable precedent for Assange’s work.  

We also hear from the late John Pilger, on whose journalistic eminence the film rather over-relies for weightiness. Celebrities contributing intermittent narration include Susan Sarandon, singer M.I.A. and former Pink Floyd man Roger Waters, these days not the most reputable of polemicists, whose darkly rasped mutterings (“What if everything we thought we knew about somebody was a lie?”) introduce a wild-eyed tone not altogether useful to the argument.

Among some densely packed, informative content, there is also a surfeit of extraneous oddity: twee animation, a bizarre digression tracing the tradition of free speech literally back to the Stone Age, and some vaporous concluding rhetoric (“We are joined together in the single strand of a shared destiny”). This obscurely titled piece is less a measured documentary than an under-edited advocacy statement. Staton’s film argues passionately for journalism, but is closer in style to Speakers’ Corner pamphleteering.

★★☆☆☆

In cinemas now