KYM STATON is the Australian director and producer of the 2023 documentary, The Trust Fall, a 126-minute rumination on the 15-year political evisceration of the journalist, activist and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who has been indicted under the 1917 US Espionage Act, and incarcerated in Belmarsh prison in London since 2019.

The release of this film in Britain and Australia comes in the wake of Assange’s final appeal at the Supreme Court on February 20-21, amid cacophonous coverage from the international media.

What inspired you to produce the documentary?

“In 2010 I was watching the news in my living room,” he replies, “and I was absolutely shocked to see 12 civilians, including two journalists, being shot dead on a street in Baghdad by a US army helicopter.

“Seven or eight years later I started to explore some films about Assange and WikiLeaks, and I started to make sense of it all. It just happened that three years ago I had some spare time to make a documentary.

“I’m an Australian and Assange is an Australian citizen who’s just a few years older than me, and I really admire his bravery, his striving for peace and truth.”

The coarse black-and-white footage filmed from the POV of a circling US Apache gunship in 2007 — subsequently disclosed to WikiLeaks by whistleblower Chelsea Manning — forms the centrepiece of The Trust Fall, providing undeniable, demented and damning evidence of the US military’s febrile ferocity during its operations in Iraq.

“What the US government didn’t bank on,” Staton continues, “was that we were going to dredge up this footage, enhance it and make it even more shocking and more powerful by putting it on a screen for an audience, eliciting all kinds of emotive elements that would make grown men cry.”

Where did you acquire the footage for the chapter of the film called Collateral Murder that features the Apache gunship incident?

“It’s freely available on the Sunshine Press YouTube channel,” says Staton. “It’s been there since 2010 but it’s only had a couple of million views. This shows you that YouTube hasn’t taken it off their platform, but they’re definitely stopping it from circulating, and perhaps that’s why only 5 per cent of the world’s population has seen it.

“Plus there is the never-seen-before footage of the 10-year-old boy who was a victim of that incident.”

He is referring to Sajad Sattar Mutashar who, along with his father, was gunned down by the Apache crew as they attempted to rescue some of the wounded from off the street. While his father was killed, Sajad survived and, during an archive interview featured in the documentary, the boy lifts up his T-shirt, in tears, to reveal a scar rising up from his stomach to his sternum.

There are far-reaching issues at stake in The Trust Fall which, ominously, are critical to the future direction of Western democracy, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and governmental accountability.

Do you have any plans to produce a follow-up documentary, regardless of whether Assange is extradited to the US or not?

“Well, this film was such a laborious process I wouldn’t be surprised if I never make one again,” confesses Staton. “It just stretched me to my absolute limits. I’m not a career documentary-maker, I’m a musician in fact; and once this is all finished I’d quite happily go back to my singer-songwriting adventures and take things easy. But certainly with this project, with this cause and this campaign I won’t stop until Julian is free.”

The film is being released in Australia and there are 20 or so screenings taking place there throughout March, and its reception will surely be different to that of Britain.

A motion was proposed in the Australian Parliament by MP Andrew Wilkie on February 15 2024 and, in response, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese argued that the Australian government had a duty to lobby for its citizens and that he had raised the issue “at the highest levels” in Britain and the US. “This thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely,” he said.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has yet to respond.