Pregnant women shot at checkpoints. Journalists gleefully gunned down from a helicopter. Child prostitutes preyed upon by mercenaries. The full squalid record of the West’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the US government’s case against Julian Assange. The charges against him are all in response to documents leaked by Chelsea Manning that exposed the brutality of coalition forces in the Middle East. As Edward Snowden puts it: ‘They want to put him in jail for the best work Wikileaks ever did.’

Ithaka, a new documentary from director Ben Lawrence, is not neutral or dispassionate. Two of the producers are brothers of Assange and his wife Stella. But the film is confident enough that the facts are in Assange’s favour that it rarely labours the case.

Other films have already told the Wikileaks story, explored the revelations and their implications. Ithaka takes a more localised approach to share the experience of Assange’s family as they campaign for his release, while trying to maintain a semblance of normality in their tumultuous lives.

Much of the story is told from the perspective of John Shipton, Assange’s once-estranged father now doing his best to ‘get Julian out of the shit’. There is a tenderness in his efforts to repair a fractured relationship under the most trying circumstances. When Assange’s diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome is revealed in an extradition hearing, Shipton identifies. ‘I don’t relate to people well myself,’ he says.

Assange is certainly in ‘the shit’. Incarceration in Britain’s most notorious prison, Belmarsh—three suicides and a murder in one month, we are told—is bad enough, with long spells in solitary and declining mental health. But Home Secretary Priti Patel has recently waved through his extradition to the US, overruling a court verdict that he would be at high risk of suicide, to face charges that could add up to a 175-year sentence.

Prosecution lawyers insist he would not serve time in a brutal ‘Supermax’ prison designed to deny inmates sunlight, but the US government has changed its story before, having previously concealed its case against Assange. With some avenues of appeal still left to pursue, however, the case is still expected to drag on for several years.

Ithaka locates Assange’s political origins in the invasion of Iraq, during which he marched alongside millions of others in protest as an idealistic student. The failure of the protest movement laid the seeds for Wikileaks, a college friend reveals, as he pursued other means of holding power accountable that crystallised into a mission statement: ‘The goal is justice, the method is transparency.’

The film breezes through his salad days as a leather-jacketed rock star at the nexus of tech disruption and investigative journalism, dropping a succession of bombshell revelations from torture at Guantanamo Bay to the quirks of the Church of Scientology. But the music stops with two allegations of sexual assault, which send Assange into his first spell of incarceration inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The embassy years merit their own film, suggests Lawrence, a story of intrigue and spies circling around the sparse interiors where Assange continues to direct his empire and send shockwaves around the world. Governments conceive outlandish plots to capture him. Eric Cantona and Lady Gaga drop in to offer support. Assange falls in love with lawyer Sara Gonzalez Devant, who changes her name to Stella Morris to spare her family unwanted attention, and the couple have two children during his seven-year spell in Ecuadorian Knightsbridge. Ithaka also shows mundane realities via CCTV footage of Assange kicking a rugby ball and riding a skateboard around the hallways. Little wonder there were regular reports of embassy staff becoming weary of their tenant.

This relative cosiness comes to a halt with the ‘Vault 7’ leaks in 2017, exposing the activities of the CIA’s hacking division. Reports emerge of the agency’s plans to assassinate Assange. An embassy whistleblower reveals that the CIA has infiltrated the security team. Stella Morris, fearing abduction or worse, stops visiting. In April 2019, Assange is arrested by British police with cooperation from a new right-wing Ecuadorian government, and the US government announces its intention to prosecute him.

According to Lawrence, the climax of the embassy saga was one of the rare moments in which ‘power of that nature reveals itself’; before then, the White House had maintained ambiguity around its intentions towards Assange. Another insight comes during the extradition hearings. Morris presses a mysterious member of the Trump administration to pardon Assange and is told the president is supportive but faces intense opposition from the national security establishment. The inside man eventually backs off after receiving death threats.

Nils Melzer, the former UN special rapporteur on torture, believes an example is being made of Assange to deter scrutiny of the security state. ‘Torture is most effective when it is inflicted in public,’ he says. Shipton laments that the media has failed itself by withholding solidarity, that journalists are serving governments against their own interests. No journalist has ever been prosecuted in the US for espionage, and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is among those warning of a dangerous precedent. Is Assange a journalist? ‘As much as Bill Gates is a computer salesman,’ says Lawrence, arguing he is a disruptor of journalism who nonetheless deserves the same protections afforded to more recognisable forms. The New York Times and Guardian have escaped charges for publishing the same documents.

Assange’s case has inspired a passionate global following and Ithaka spends time with the unique and colourful coalition composed of white-shoe lawyers, libertarian politicians, actors, celebrities, and dissident journalists. There is also a powerful grassroots movement behind him that cuts across the left-right divide, activists of varied persuasions who believe Assange is a martyr for our freedoms fighting to expose the security state. The director adds that the Australian has strong support in non-democracies where tyranny is better understood. Ai Weiwei makes the same point when he attends an extradition hearing.

The politics are deeply personal for Assange’s family. He appears in snippets of snatched calls over bedtime stories for the children. ‘Try to make him laugh,’ says Shipton as the family prepares for a call after a walk in the woods. Visits to Belmarsh take place in the full glare of the media spotlight. Stella—now Mrs Assange, after a ceremony at Belmarsh—performs the roles of single mother, lawyer, and campaign coordinator, fired by her experience growing up in apartheid South Africa. ‘The injustice is overwhelming,’ she tells the BBC in an emotional interview.

Over it all, though, hangs a sense of futility. ‘Our time is gone,’ Shipton laments, referring to all the years already lost and those to come, and perhaps a pre-arrest period of estrangement from his son, which he is loath to address. This is also a fight for posterity and the legacy of Wikileaks’ work. ‘No country in the world is untouched’ by its revelations, points out Lawrence, noting that they are still studied for insights into the mechanisms of power. Perhaps history will judge Assange more kindly. The director is less optimistic about the immediate future, suspecting deterrence has been established.

‘The message has been sent,’ says Lawrence. ‘If you’re going to report on US national security and classified documents you would think deeply about it. I think it may be a long time before someone like Chelsea Manning or an organisation like Wikileaks repeat that exposure.’ There was a moment, he continues, in which we could have learned how the world really works; after Assange, though, everyone is ‘frightened again’. ‘It feels like they’ve won.’ For Assange’s family and global coalition of supporters, though, there is no option but to fight on.