The Six Billion Dollar Man (2025)
The Six Billion Dollar Man is a 2025 documentary movie directed by Eugene Jarecki, with a running time of 2h 13m. It stars Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Pamela Anderson.
Eugene Jarecki takes the Julian Assange case out of the headlines and lays it out end to end. The WikiLeaks founder published classified material, fought extradition to the United States for years, and has now walked out of prison, leaving the argument about press freedom louder than it was when he went in.
Jarecki builds the film from people with a stake in it. Assange appears, so does Edward Snowden. Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges and Jeremy Scahill supply the political reading of the prosecution, and Pamela Anderson turns up as one of his more improbable public advocates. The attention stays on the legal machinery and on the question of what a publisher is allowed to publish.
It premiered at Cannes in 2025, won the L'Œil d'or Grand Prize for documentary, and made Jarecki the first documentary filmmaker to take a Golden Globe. He has a position, states it, and spends the film showing his work. Viewers who came in with an opinion about Assange will find it tested at least once.
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For the paper trail behind the film, The most dangerous man in the world covers Assange and WikiLeaks at book length, from the early leaks through the years when governments started treating him as a threat. Panama papers gives you the other end of the same process: reporters handed an enormous cache of documents, working out what the public gets to see and what it costs them. We Are Arrested moves the argument to Turkey and is written from inside the consequences a journalist can face for publishing, which is the outcome Assange spent years fighting. For the story in dramatised form, the Swedish series The Pirate Bay follows another set of digital idealists meeting the full weight of the law in a courtroom.