Poitras depicts complex WikiLeaks founder in ‘Risk’
NEW YORK — Tomorrow’s “Risk,” an intimate portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, completes a “crisscross” for Boston’s Oscarwinning documentarian Laura Poitras.
With unrivaled access to Assange, Poitras first began filming “Risk” in 2011.
She was interrupted by her amazing filmed-as-ithappenedKong “Citizenfour,” in which Edward Snowden revealed our government’s massive unauthorized surveillance of its citizens.
That won Poitras, 53, her 2015 Academy Award. Then she returned to Assange with “Risk,” unveiled last May at Cannes.
“It’s a portrait of Julian and the organization and the other people in the organization. It’s a portrait of a person who shape-shifted the landscape of journalism,” Poitras said.
“Risk” charts Assange’s life from his WikiLeaks London base to the Swedish rape charges that prompt him to seek asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy. There, nearly five years later, he remains, a virtual prisoner.
“He understood the impact of the internet, I think, before a lot of people did in its shift of global politics and how it would shift journalism.
“He’s also here as a flawed individual — and that comes through with his words or statements about women.
“We’re showing a group of people who are transforming the world through journalism. It’s also a story about the emergence of the internet and its impact on global politics and journalism.
“And it’s a portrait of people who are risking their freedom, their lives, because they believe in the work that they’re doing,” Poitras added.
“Everybody in this film” — Assange, tech expert Jacob Appelbaum, his lawyer Sarah Harrison — “are putting everything on the line for the work that they do. As Julian says in the film, ‘If you’re not fighting for the things you believe in every day, then you’re losing, right?’”
It wasn’t until editing when, “I realized, ‘OK, this is too much for one film. I can’t fit in both of these stories.’ But there are some overlaps between the two films.
“There’s a scene of Julian assisting Snowden getting asylum, he’s on the phone. That’s in both films. So there’s a crisscross between the two films.”