Today the Toronto International Film Festival announced that the world premiere of DreamWorks Pictures’ The Fifth Estate, a dramatic thriller based on real events and directed by Bill Condon, will open the Festival on September 5. 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 Fifth Estate explores how the sharing of information has the power to change history. No matter where they sit on the WikiLeaks debate, audiences will be blown away by Condon’s powerful film featuring commanding performances by Daniel Brühl and by Benedict Cumberbatch who is transformed as Julian Assange," said Piers Handling, Director and CEO of TIFF.
The Fifth Estate is presented by DreamWorks Pictures and Reliance Entertainment in association with Participant Media and is produced by Steve Golin and Michael Sugar, with Bill Condon directing. The screenplay is by Josh Singer, based on the book Inside WikiLeaks by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the Guardian book WikiLeaks by David Leigh and Luke Harding. The film will be released in North America on October 18, 2013.
The 38th Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5 to 15, 2013.
Tags:
Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Condon, The Fifth Estate, tiff, TIFF 2013
Comments:
"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."