Watch the trail­er for Lau­ra Poitras’ Wik­iLeaks doc Risk

Lau­ra Poitras, direc­tor of the Oscar-win­ning CIT­I­ZEN­FOUR, has released a new trail­er for her upcom­ing Wik­iLeaks doc­u­men­tary, Risk. The film fol­lows Wik­iLeaks’ con­tro­ver­sial founder and edi­tor-in-chief Julian Assange over a six-year period.

Poitras gained ​“unprece­dent­ed access” to Assange for this doc­u­men­tary, film­ing him dur­ing the Arab Spring in 2010 to his retreat into London’s Ecuado­ri­an Embassy where he cur­rent­ly resides.

When Poitras screened the first cut of the film at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in 2016, crit­ics not­ed the rel­a­tive absence of the neg­a­tive alle­ga­tions lev­elled against Assange, includ­ing unre­solved rape charges.

“These alle­ga­tions clear­ly aren’t the director’s con­cern – she appears to large­ly agree with Wik­iLeaks edi­tor Sarah Harrison’s assess­ment that they serve to dis­tract the pub­lic from the organisation’s work,” we said in our first-look review.

How­ev­er, the film’s tone seems to have since changed, with Poitras hav­ing reframed the nar­ra­tive. Since last May Assange has been involved in the leak­ing of Hillary Clinton’s emails dur­ing the 2016 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign, and been accused of hav­ing links with Russ­ian pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin. 

In this new trail­er, we hear Poitras ques­tion her own posi­tion on Assange. ​“This is not the film I thought I was mak­ing,” she says. ​“I thought I could ignore the con­tra­dic­tions, I thought they were not part of the sto­ry. I was wrong. They are becom­ing the story.”

Poitras’ last film was the 2014 doc­u­men­tary CIT­I­ZEN­FOUR, which fol­lowed the gov­ern­ment employ­ee turned whistle­blow­er Edward Snow­den as the NSA spy­ing scan­dal broke.

Risk will air on Show­time in the US before being made avail­able to stream online.

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!