Two major films have recently been made about Wikileaks. Alex Gibney’s documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks came first whilst Hollywood’s The Fifth Estate thriller is now on release around the UK. But neither of these films had any access to the man behind the Wikileaks phenomenon. In contrast, Mediastan which was released recently is produced by Julian Assange, who remains unable to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
Mediastan is directed by Johannes Wahlstrom, who also features in the film as an Assange-substitute, making the journeys abroad that Assange himself is no longer able to make. Wahlstrom is a Swedish journalist who is gatekeeper to Wikileaks in Scandinavia. He has described Assange as the Internet’s James Bond and has himself been involved in controversy over his work.
With all the information, mis-information, myth and surmise that surrounds Wikileaks and its founder this film was an opportunity to give the inside story. However Mediastan is not a setting straight of the record, or an Assange version of the events that have led to him being holed up in an embassy in London. The Wikileaks story is not retold and Assange’s current travails are not mentioned.
Instead we follow Wahlstrom and a small team of journalists and film makers as they tour Central Asia. They arrange interviews with local newspaper editors without mentioning exactly who they represent, then film the reactions when they announce they are from Wikileaks. They are hoping that the journalists they meet will publish the Wikileaks cables, but there is a sense of trivialisation of the Wikileaks project and at times they come across as kids playing, enjoying the thrill of taking their surprise around the world and the insistence on signed forms before releasing the documents.
The film is not the Wikileaks hagiography it could easily have been. One of their targets in the film describes Wikileaks as ‘a totally useless thing’. ‘Wikileaks,’ he continues on camera, ‘is a superficial shell’. In Kyrgyzstan Radio Liberty is keen to broadcast the leaked documents. The next day it transpires that the station is funded by the US Congress. Unsurprisingly the cables stay unbroadcast.
Few individual subjects of the cables are mentioned, but the film starts with the story of Meraeon Connaev a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. He is shown the document that explains his detention in Guantanamo, information which isn’t supposed to be declassified until 2033. It transpires he was imprisoned because the Americans wanted information about a school in Pakistan and refugees in Tadjestan. Connaev receives this information with a laugh, saying they could have asked him that when he was in Kandahar. Instead he was kept in a cage for five years.
This seemingly indefensible case sets the tone for the film, with the Wikileakers as the good guys, going round the world offering free information to any newspapers that want it. Whenever an editor signs up to partner Wikileaks they get a Skype conversation with Julian Assange, who lectures them on how to use the information.
One issue with the film is that there seems little need to make this journey. Editors from all around the world don’t have to be contacted face to face, and Wikileaks could easily have achieved its aims without sending these young people across central Asia.
This is not the film that explains Wikileaks and Assange. The access to Assange that the film makers had does not result in any revelations about Assange and the focus on a road trip is unnecessary. Mediastan does demonstrate the prevalence of censorship and media collusion with power across the world. But that is nothing new and given the huge interest in other aspects of the Wikileaks story, driving around Asia meeting editors is not as vital a film as could have been made with direct access to Assange.
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