Win Tickets to We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks

It fast becomes apparent how little you know of an organisation dedicated to transparency.

Tom Glasson
Published on July 01, 2013
Updated on July 23, 2019

We Steal Secrets is the story of Wikileaks, and from the outset it fast becomes apparent how little you know of an organisation dedicated to transparency and the sharing of information. Directed by Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the documentary mirrors the real-world by focusing on two key individuals: Wikileaks' Australian founder Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the US soldier whose disclosure of classified documents thrust Assange onto the world stage.

The stories of the two men are told with surprising sensitivity, particularly in the case of Manning, who — on account of his ongoing incarceration — is represented exclusively by typed words on a screen. Sent over the course of his deployment in Iraq, the catalogue of Manning's brief online exchanges with various hackers reveals an extraordinarily lonely soul unable to reconcile serious questions about both his own identity and what he perceived to be the ongoing cover-up of atrocities by the US Government. "I want people to see the truth," he wrote, just before leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Assange. "It affects everyone on earth."

In all, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks achieves a fine balance in its depiction of two men whose lives became inextricably linked and, thereafter, changed almost certainly for the worse.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks is in cinemas on July 4. Thanks to Universal Pictures, we have 10 double in-season passes to give away. To be in the running, subscribe to our newsletter (if you haven't already) and then email [email protected] with your name and address. Read our full review of We Steal Secrets here.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SdezJrNaL70

Published on July 01, 2013 by Tom Glasson
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