Benedict Cumberbatch (left) stars as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl stars as Daniel Domscheit-Berg in the film The Fifth Estate
We live in more fascinating and more dangerous times than we can ever comprehend and the entire WikiLeaks saga, which has been given the Hollywood treatment in a new movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch and directed by Bill Condon, appears to have captured that sobering realisation.
The Fifth Estate will be released in October. The film tells the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Cumberbatch) as he and his team at WikiLeaks attempt to expose some of the secrets the elite of this world would rather keep buried, including machine-gun attacks on reporters in Afghanistan and some of the shady goings-on in the world’s supposedly respectable financial institutions.
Based on books by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Luke Harding, the movie looks at the relationship between Assange and his early supporter and eventual colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and how the website’s growth and influence led to an irreparable rift between the two friends.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
The Fifth Estate movie trailer comes hot on the heels of the release of a documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which has been written and directed by Alex Gibney.
The documentary follows the WikiLeaks story and how through disaffected soldier Bradley Manning some 390,000 US secret military records – effectively the biggest information leak in world history – found their way onto the internet.
The story unfolds into a greater debate about who gets to control information in the world we now live in.
