The Trust Fall: Julian Assange — a heartfelt and powerful advocacy for the WikiLeaks founder's freedom
Filmmaker Kym Staton shares insights about his work on a new documentary about the Australian journalist's pernicious persecution and the case ramifications for press freedom and democracy
If what he exposed wasn't true, they wouldn't try to hide it.
If minds couldn't learn, they wouldn't try to stifle them.
If hearts couldn't unite, they wouldn't try to divide them.
Australian musician, writer, founder and director of the streaming platform Films For Change Kym Staton wrote this poem for his first documentary film about Julian Assange and his relentless persecution, called “The Trust Fall: Julian Assange”.
Former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has described the Assange case as “the biggest judicial scandal in history” and this may well be an understatement.
“The Trust Fall: Julian Assange” is a very powerful, authentic and very emotionally-charged depiction of the injustice Assange has been subjected to for over 13 years but it is also a truthful and honest representation of the events surrounding WikiLeaks and Assange, and a profoundly sincere advocacy for the fate of press freedom, human rights and the future of humanity more broadly.
“The Trust Fall: Julian Assange” has been touring various film festivals around the world and is up for theatrical release early next year. A good part of its financing was raised through crowdfunding on gofundme, where anyone who wants to and has the opportunity, can still go and support the cause.
I had the privilege to sit down with the film director Kym Staton for an interview on his work on the documentary and the wider implications of the Assange case.
You can watch the movie trailer here.
The interview was edited for clarity.
Kym, I know you’ve spoken about this before in earlier interviews, but I think it’s an important aspect of your work so it bears repeating. You’ve said you had followed the case loosely since 2010 but it wasn’t until 2017 that you engaged with it more seriously and started paying more attention to it. I’d like to ask you to tell the story of what exactly made you decide that you needed to take action.
Kym Staton: Sure. It was a combination of a few things. I watched a few documentaries on the topic, well, going back before that in 2010, I did see the Collateral Murder video on the news but at the time I didn’t know what that was, what it actually meant, what happened and who was responsible for bringing that information to the public. So it was, yeah, around 2017, I started watching a few documentaries, Risk and a few others, and started questioning the narratives that were being spread, trying to understand the significance of what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange had brought to the world and I saw the Ithaka documentary which is directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s brother and that was quite insightful.
And then I went along to a talk which was only a few years ago, I guess that was at the beginning of the project, I went along to a talk by John Shipton, Julian’s father. And in that talk he described one of the situations during the extradition trial where Julian was kept in a glass room at the back of the court and he had to speak through a tiny slot and crash down on his knees and his lawyer had to stand on his tiptoes to be able to communicate and I just thought that was a real injustice and there was something not right going on.
All of these bits of information just came into my mind and the combination of that with a sort of a growing sense of my own ignorance and my own inaction and uselessness on the issue not being involved and not even knowing anything about it, I realised I had some catching up to do. So I decided to make just a simple YouTube documentary and spent a few months doing it but the interest took off and the support grew and grew and the project expanded and as we went, it just got bigger and bigger and I realised that we could do a cinema-worthy piece and as the funding grew, then we embellished the project and developed it and could do things like the animations, and interviewed people that were previously hard to reach.
It was in, I think it was 2022, about a year into the project and we’d made the first animation which was actually of that situation in the court room with the glass dock, we had that animated and we shared it on social media and Julian’s wife, Stella Assange, noticed that and she messaged us and said “You should come to London, come to Julian’s birthday reception and she agreed to be interviewed and on that trip we interviewed Stella, John Pilger, Kristinn Hrafnsson, Rebecca Vincent and a victim of the Afghan war. That didn’t end up in the film but a bunch of interviews and then the interest really took off at that point and it really was an explosion of interest and the project expanded from a sort of a zero budget to a small budget to a medium budget and that’s what brought it to this point of something that we can get into cinemas and get into festivals.
You’ve described the case as a “litmus test for humanity” in previous interviews. What exactly do you mean by this?
Kym Staton: Well, I guess it’s a test in the sense that the response of the world to the situation, to the injustice, to the persecution is really a judgment of our awareness, our compassion and our bravery. And also the precedent set by Julian’s persecution, the unprecedented event of an Australian citizen, Australian journalist being extradited to be tried under a U.S. law, which is an obscene travesty of justice, a real shocking misuse of the law and an extraterritorial overreach. So the test is whether decent people around the world can see through the narratives and sort of cut through the lies and the smear and get down to the real guts of what this is about which is the persecution of somebody who told the truth and exposed the crimes of others. So it’s a measure of our ability to unite and collaborate and work together to do something about it.
Following on from this, I want to talk about the title of the documentary. Previously it was called “Free The Truth” and then you renamed it to “The Trust Fall”. In a conversation with Australian whistleblower David McBride you explained the origin of this title, that it essentially represents the idea that when somebody exposes truths which are kept secret, they rely on the public, there’s a great deal of mutual trust involved. And you also drew this analogy of someone standing on stage and falling into the crowd, they trust that the crowd will catch them. Given the proceedings of this persecution and the case, do you think that we have failed Julian, we have failed to catch him?
Kym Staton: Yeah, it’s been a big failure so far, nothing that has been tried or attempted has worked. But he’s still alive and he’s still hanging in there somehow. So he’s still falling, he’s still on this long downwards trajectory with his health and with his mental condition and his situation gets worse and worse, he’s kept in worse conditions, colder, narrower places, his treatment gets worse and so he’s still falling and it’s still up to us to save him from death, I mean the 175 years in prison sentence that he’s threatened with, with these bogus espionage charges, is in reality a death sentence.
They are trying to kill him slowly, it’s a modern form of execution to put somebody, an innocent man, in fact a courageous, genius person into solitary confinement for four and a half years and arbitrary detainment for 13 years now if you trace it back from the house arrest through to the embassy and then to prison. All of that is being a modern method of execution. In the modern age, we can’t do what they did to the underground publishers 300 years ago in London. They would take a publisher to the town square and hang them and cut them in half and drag them down the road and that was how they threatened journalists and publishers and dissidents to scare off other, future publishers or anyone that was engaged in sharing truths and challenging the narratives.
But this modern way is very clever and sneaky, where they can just keep someone confined and restricted so much in such a cruel circumstance that they lose their mind or develop health conditions related to stress. Assange has had a mini stroke, his left eyelid is drooping so it looks like he’s winking, he’s had terrible bouts of depression and so all of these health situations, he had Covid, Covid passed around amongst the prisoners at one stage last year, I believe. So all of this is a way to slowly execute somebody quietly in a sort of a hidden way.
You said it yourself, we’ve tried a lot of things in our advocacy for his release and in the early years of the case, there wasn’t too much political pressure, too much political involvement but today that’s not the case. A lot of politicians, both from Australia, from the EU, from the United States, are putting pressure on the Biden administration to drop the charges and there’s still no end in sight to this case. I’ve been hearing recently from people who are involved in the case that they think Assange will be extradited as early as January. I really don’t want to deviate too much from your area of expertise but you must have an opinion on this. Who do you think has the power to release him, is it the U.S. president, is it someone else, is it the public?
Kym Staton: Well, everyone really. The Australian Prime Minister has the power to get Assange free because he is an Australian citizen so it is possible for Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister to demand his release. Give us back our citizen, let him go free. That is possible, even though Albanese tries to pretend it’s not, that’s a lie.
And of course it’s possible for Joe Biden to have the charges dropped, simply just drop the charges, he doesn’t even have to say anything or do anything just drop the charges and he’ll just make himself look half-decent, look half-reasonable and compassionate and somewhat look like he’s standing up for democracy and for free speech as he claims to.
And we have, as you say, governments, leaders in other countries calling for his release. The pressure slowly grows, it’s not happening fast enough, it needs to really pick up, it just needs to accelerate and that’s why I think education and awareness are very important. Particularly in Australia because what we’ve seen with Anthony Albanese, the Labour government, before Albanese was elected, in a closed backroom meeting he was quoted as saying “Enough is enough, I don’t see the point of this case dragging on so long”, which really sounds like he felt that Julian should be free.
And it took him about six months being in power before he finally did anything or even made a statement in respect of that. When he did finally pipe up, what he said was that…he just repeated that statement and then the anticipation from a lot of supporters of Julian Assange really increased at that point.
There was some optimism that he was going to do something, and we waited and waited, and it amounted to nothing. It was through various Freedom of Information requests by some different Australian MPs and lawyers that revealed that there was almost zero documentation of correspondence between the Australian and the U.S. governments, which is unusual for bureaucrats that love to do paper work, and Albanese and the Foreign Minister Penny Wong, at that point they insisted that they were doing quiet diplomacy so they kind of hid behind this sort of sense that they were quietly talking directly to these people, to Biden and to the U.S. DOJ and the administration.
But then what’s been revealed in the last few months through further Freedom of Information requests is that what Australian government is working towards is that after Julian is extradited, sentenced, imprisoned in America, then the Australian government would like to have Julian serve his sentence back in Australia, which is just completely wrong and completely immoral and unjust to have a journalist go through all of this, ended up in prison and then be just carried back to Australia and in a prison in Australia.
They’ve also just recently made a lot of excuses that…they’re basically trying to say that they can’t interfere with the U.S. politics and even suggesting that Joe Biden can’t interfere with the legal process and they do that regularly, routinely, so that’s also a lie. So I guess what we can observe here is that the Australian government thinks that the Australian citizens are naive and stupid, and Australian citizens really have to prove that we’re not.
We need to get informed and see through these kind of smokescreens, these facades of democracy and understand that there’s corruption and there’s a scapegoating process happening here designed to intimidate the world and scare journalists and scare whistleblowers and that’s what it’s all about as well as stopping one very clever, very determined individual - Julian Assange from continuing his very important work of publishing and journalism.
Current U.S. presidential candidates have pledged to release Assange on day one, I know Robert F. Kennedy has done that, Marianne Williamson and a few others…Vivek Ramaswamy I think, and these are people from both political persuasions. Do you think there’s any merit to these pledges, or they are just using it [the case], like Albanese did in Australia, as a political tool?
Kym Staton: Well, we can only hope…Politicians are known for making promises that they don’t keep. Another presidential candidate that could potentially free Julian and I really believe that she would is Jill Stein, the Greens’ representative who is featured in the documentary because she is part of the Doctors for Assange group who are advocating for Julian’s health and raising awareness to the transgressions of his human rights in regards to his bodily integrity and the conditions of his detainment. I have no doubt at all that she would follow through having met with her and connected with her for the documentary.
Robert F. Kennedy has said that he would free, pardon Julian Assange on day one. This pardon concept is a little bit strange and inappropriate because he hasn’t done anything wrong. Let’s hope that he would follow through. It’s significant to see these politicians in America making it an issue and that’s a good thing, that’s a step, that’s what needs to happen and through public awareness, increased understanding of the case amongst the public, hopefully that will lead to the freedom of Julian Assange becoming a key election issue in the next U.S. elections.
Donald Trump is an interesting one because he seems to really jump around on the issue. There was a time when he said he loves WikiLeaks and then sometime, not long after he pretended that he didn’t know anything about WikiLeaks, so there’s another lie there. But Donald Trump’s son was in an interview a few months ago and said that he believes Assange should be free so I wonder whether Trump would have the guts to stand up for this man and for free speech and press freedom if he gets back into the presidential position.
But one thing’s for sure is that public pressure is important because ultimately it’s these politicians and leaders that have to solve this and free Julian and they don’t always do what the people want so it has to be a really big number of people that are asking for his freedom in order for those politicians to listen up and do the right thing.
I’d like to talk about the documentary and the production process. It’s now almost three years in the making, you started the project in February 2021, I believe.
Kym Staton: It was around May 2021, so about two and a half years.
Ah, sorry. You held the first premiere at the Meblourne Documentary Film Festival where you actually won a prize in the Best Emerging Director category which is a very well-deserved prize so congratulations! What’s the reception been so far, I know you’ve been showing the documentary at various festivals around the world?
Kym Staton: It’s been very strong. I think this is not an easy film for festivals to decide to select because it’s strongly in support of Julian, it’s a harsh watch containing the Collateral Murder footage. It’s a tragic film, it’s very emoptional so it’s not a crowdpleaser, it’s not a family-friendly film. But we’ve had many festivals, especially human rights festivals to select it, it’s won a few awards, I suppose most notably we’ve shown it at the Warsaw Film Festival which is a very large, long-running festival. They did four screenings which were well-attended. The world premiere in Melbourne on the 30th July was a full house in the largest venue.
The most exciting thing is to see the audience response after the screenings and with that very first screening we had no idea how people would respond. Would they just sit there quietly, would they be on a ball, in a heap on the floor, would they clap? And what really surprised us in that first premiere screening was the audience applauds. They clapped six times during the film at key moments and that’s something I’ve never seen in nearly a decade of screening documentaries, hundreds of documentaries that I’ve organised screenings, hosted those screenings.
So to see the audience respond in that way was very exciting, and then at the end of the film to have a standing ovation and to have people cheer, it was incredibly touching and I just kind of made my way down to the stage because we were doing a Q&A panel discussion with some of those wonderful people that appeared in the film. So I just made my way down to the stage and then when I got to the stage, couple of people came up and hugged me so it was like congratulations, one of them I didn’t even know who they were. This big guy just came and said “Can I give you a hug, man?” So you know, these are very special moments, I think at that point we knew that we were onto something.
We didn’t actually even…you know, we could have just thought “Well, ok, the film won an award and got a standing ovation and it’s sold out, ok we succeeded”. But we didn’t do that, we got very excited and we then went and did another four and a half months of additional edits and polishing, we then added the interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and made some developments to the animations and then we did the colour grading and sound design which was only done quite quickly.
It actually motivated me just to take the film to another level at that point because I realised we’ve already achieved our goals to make a film that brought people to tears, to make them furious and make them cry and make them angry, and then I thought well, let’s just see if we can make this film even better and that way it will be a more powerful tool for advocacy to help Julian.
Yeah, it’s a very profound experience, having watched the documentary now it does make you angry it does make you want to cry at multiple parts of the movie. So I understand that [reaction]. You’ve made some interesting artistic choices in the production, you mentioned including animations and you have a couple of poems you’ve written and you had the movie narrated by some high-profile artists like Roger Waters, for example. Why did you decide to break convention in this way, what does that add to the movie you think?
Kym Staton: That’s a great question, thank you. Well, one of my concerns was that political documentaries are typically cold and dry and I have seen some documentaries that step outside of that paradigm, in particular a film called Unity by Shawn Monson, an American director, one of my favourite documentaries. It’s basically very poetic, philosophical statements with imagery and music throughout and I found that film incredibly moving and so I did have in mind to do, at least for the last chapter of the film, to help sort of pick people up and provide some motivation and inspiration not to just leave them on the floor. And so in the middle of last year, 2022, I started writing the narration.
I was just writing a little bit each day. I’ll get up in the morning and when my mind is fresh I’ll just get a cup of tea and put on some sort of nice soothing music, sort of ambient music and just sort of pour out my feelings because at that point I’d been working on this for a year and learning a lot and it was a very emotionally gruelling process to delve into the case and all of the persecution and all the disgusting treatment. So it just sort of flowed out of me all of these words and each day I would just write, I did that for 60 days and just write something and just share it on Facebook and it was interesting to gauge the response.
The lines, the poems and statements that got the most response from people were the ones that ended up in the film, it was a good way to avoid being subjective and really figure out what resonates with people, just based on how many shares they got and the comments from people. And that’s what ended up in the film. I think that the advantage or the benefit of these sorts of, this kind of shift out of the convention is that hopefully we can really reach people at a heart level, we can remind them of what humans are capable of, what the world could be.
You know there’s things you want to say that you can’t say with prose, you can’t just say with cold, normal statements, you need metaphor, sometimes. And when you have a combination of poetic language, metaphors, imagery, music and then the sound design, the way that the volume comes up and down, when all of these elements combine, I think you can create something that can’t be measured, it has unlimited ability to change somebody’s mind or wake somebody up or stir the emotions. And we want to hopefully get the interest of people that wouldn’t normally watch a political documentary because of how dry and cold they are. And so by including philosophy and poetry and art, the animations which are very beautifully done, hopefully we can get the interest of people that might never watch a political documentary and therefore the audience becomes much wider.
Yeah, and you are an artist yourself - you are a musician traditionally and you write and you are a film director so this must have been an obvious choice. Thinking about these instruments that you used and what you said previously that one of your main goals with the documentary is to raise awareness, what do you think a meaningful reaction to it would be, what are you hoping that people would do when they see the documentary?
Kym Staton: Yeah, well, I hope that they have an emotional response, even men, we’ve had some men tell us that they cried watching it, that was one of my goals because men tend to be very closed and we’re told that we shouldn’t cry, we should be strong and hard and emotionless and maybe that’s one of the problems in the world.
So for men and women to have an emotional reaction which is just natural in the face of this injustice and terrible treatment, I would be very worried if someone doesn’t cry watching this film. It’s very gruelling, and so if they react emotionally and then they also digest the information and learn more and take in all of these details and all of these facts and weigh it all up and then at the end of it I hope that they feel impelled to do something, to say something or take some action, whether it’s to write to their local MP or take part in a protest or I don’t know, write a song or write a book, or even just tell their friends, even just tell their friends to watch the film and pass it on, then that way the awareness can grow and develop and hopefully we can solve this and we can free this man and protect free speech for future generations because that’s so important for our children and for our children’s children to be able to speak their mind and challenge governments and authorities and communicate with each other, our ideas and speak freely if it doesn’t hurt anybody else.
It is. You’ve interviewed 23 people, I think for the documentary, some of whom are, as you mentioned Jill Stein, ardent advocates for Assange since the very beginning, you’ve interviewed also the legendary Dan Elsberg before he sadly passed away. This is the Pentagon Papers whistleblower from the 1970s who played a key role in bringing the Vietnam war to end. Is there anything you learned during these interviews and conversations which stuck out to you or made a very strong impression on you which you probably didn’t know before or something that amazed you?
Kym Staton: Many things. It was an incredible learning experience directing the film, great privilege to interview and connect with all of these wonderful caring intelligent people. Daniel Elsberg was in particular a fantastic opportunity and he was so generous with his time, he spoke to me for over two hours in his back yard in San Francisco and you can just feel that he’s really a caring compassionate person.
Something that I was surprised and excited to find is this connection between Elsberg, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, in that Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance which is Satyagraha, which means holding firm to truth, in other words tell the truth no matter what, and believe in it and stick to the truth. That was something that inspired Martin Luther King, Daniel Elsberg and you know, Elsberg being that he was actually working for the U.S. government as an analyst and as a soldier serving in Vietnam and that he had such an incredible change of mind, a turnaround in his life through the exposure to a follower of Gandhi and a woman that he met, who became his wife, that was a peace activist.
That was a nice reminder that humans can change our ideas and our habits and our actions, our beliefs and instead of just going along with war and doing what we’re told, we can become advocates for peace. So this theme of truth and a truth force, Satyagraha and world peace is a strong theme in the film and we really wanted to highlight the fact that Assange and WikiLeaks were on a mission to end wars. Julian has a famous quote that he said in the Stop the war speech in London, some years ago. He said: “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth”. So these are all strong themes in the film and I did notice amongst all the interviewees that, even though people came from different sides of politics and different viewpoints, the common mission and wish of everybody is a world without wars.
Are you planning to make the entire interviews public?
Kym Staton: Yeah, I did have that in mind. I think once the dust settles, once the release is really moving along, then if I have the time and energy I’ll go on and bring them up and put them out on social media because they are very fascinating. Maybe in a podcast form or maybe in a video or segments of videos, because obviously we ended up with more than 25 hours of footage which had to be then compressed down to two hours, so there’s another 23 hours of interesting stuff that people might find quite fascinating.
I’m sure. My last question is related to the distribution of the documentary. You’re now in contact with distributors around the world and I was wondering if someone wants to bring the movie to their country, then what’s the process, how should they go about it?
Kym Staton: Yeah, we did actually just recently secured distribution for the entire world through Journeyman Pictures, based in London. So they’ll be handling the distribution. However, with the theatrical element, it is possible for distributors in other countries to become a sub-distributor for their region. So we would welcome and invite distributors from any country that would like to help to get the film into cinemas, they can reach out to me or to Journeyman Pictures. Where we are at at present is that the film is available for festival screenings, for institutional screenings, which is for schools and universities, and for theatrical.
So we’re pitching it to cinemas in Australia at present and we are getting response from cinemas so it will come out in Australia early. It’s actually just this afternoon I got the first booking from a cinema which was just really exciting that it can be in that environment and have a live audience and a big screen and so on. There will be a theatrical release in Australia starting in January and then we’ll go to other regions as we progress through the year. We intend to show the film in a live environment initially with audiences because I think it’s the most powerful experience to create change and impact people and then we will also go to streaming and SVOD [subscription video on demand] and pay- per-view Google Play. Apple iTunes is all in the pipeline for some time next year, once we finish the theatrical process.
But the film actually did have a broadcast couple of weeks ago on RT which is a major satellite company, most of their subscribers are in the Middle East, Africa, India so we jumped on that opportunity because that audience is very hard to reach. I haven’t got the figures yet but I believe it would have been millions of people seeing it over just that broadcast. That was very exciting and we just really hope that the film will catch on through word of mouth and through advocacy and organisations on…it won’t be long before we open up for community screenings, as well, and people can go to our website thetrustfall.org to register their interest in community screenings, to view our upcoming screenings, join a mailing list and support the film and so on.
Thank you very much, Kym. You’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you for making the movie, it’s truly brilliant, you did an incredible job.
Kym Staton: My pleasure, thanks for the opportunity.