The trials of Julian Assange go on: there is no end in sight to his incarceration on remand in London’s brutal Belmarsh prison pending the renewal of the US government’s extradition request, which almost certainly would put him in an American supermax jail for the rest of his life. This film, directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, tells the heart-rending personal story of his family’s battle to free him.
No public figure has had a more wildly fluctuating reputation on the political stock exchange, with the possible exception of Aung San Suu Kyi. As one media pundit says here: people have almost forgotten what they think of Assange. In 2010, the founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks sensationally exposed evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, a story pursued in concert with global mainstream media organisations including the Guardian. He became a liberal hero. But then he was confined to tiny rooms in London’s Ecuadorian embassy from 2012 to 2019 as a political asylum seeker, rather than face a sex assault investigation in Sweden, which he claimed was simply a smear and a scam to extradite him to the US.
