TIFF Trailer: The World Premiere of WikiLeaks thriller The Fifth Estate opens the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival
Triggering our age of high-stakes secrecy, explosive news leaks and the trafficking of classified information, WikiLeaks forever changed the game. Now, in a dramatic thriller based on real events, The Fifth Estate reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization. The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society—and what are the costs of exposing them?” A dramatic thriller based on real events, “The Fifth Estate” reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization.
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“The Fifth Estate” is based in part on Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s “Inside WikiLeaks.” It presents Domscheit-Berg as a hero for standing up to Assange. Here he is in his own words:
Along with trying to found a global anti-censorship movement, I had assigned myself another job, perhaps the toughest of my life. I had gotten t-shirts printed with the WL logo…because I wanted to save two cents per t-shirt, I’d ordered them in white…Who buys white t-shirts? Especially in a social clique where black t-shirts are something of a dress code. I myself had never worn a white t-shirt in my entire life!
Now I was sitting on 250 shirts…I literally had to stop people in their tracks as they were passing our stand and beg them to trade €5 from their wallets for a t-shirt.
Julian preferred to engage potential customers in deep conversations about the state of the world. He stood there talking and talking, occasionally getting into an argument, until no one was thinking about t-shirts anymore…
(I had) the idea to have the WL hourglass tattooed on my back…I needed two Tylenol with water and was constantly asking Fjölnir which country of the logo he was on. ‘Now doing Iceland.’ I sighed. ‘Morocco.’ OMG. By the time we got to Cape Hope, hope was something I no longer had. To this day I run around with half of a WL logo tattooed on my back.
– Daniel Domscheit-Berg, “Inside WikiLeaks.”