Julian Assange open to political action as Cannes hosts documentary

By Hanna Rantala and Miranda Murray

CANNES, France (Reuters) -WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is at the Cannes Film Festival this week for the documentary "The Six Billion Dollar Man," is thinking about how to become politically active again once he has fully recovered from prison, said his wife, Stella.

Assange, 53, returned to his native Australia after pleading guilty last June under an agreement with U.S. officials to one count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security materials.

The plea ended Assange's five-year stay in a British prison, which followed seven years at the Ecuador embassy as he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations.

Assange denied those allegations and called them a pretext to extradite him to the United States over WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables.

"He was in a very grave situation in the prison. He's recovering from that," Stella Assange told Reuters in Cannes.

"But now he's coming to understand how grave the situation outside (prison) is and thinking, making plans to find the means of what to do about it," she added.

"He's very, very concerned about the state of the world and the state that we're all in right now," said Stella, who met Assange in London in 2011 while working as part of his legal team.

Julian and Stella Assange, wearing a brooch with a picture of British designer Vivienne Westwood holding a sign saying "Stop Killing," walked the red carpet on Wednesday evening.

Julian has so far not spoken at any of his appearances.

CANARY IN A COAL MINE

The documentary from Emmy-winning director Eugene Jarecki takes on the tone of a high-tech international thriller to recount Assange's fight against extradition, using WikiLeaks footage and archives, and previously unpublished evidence.

Jarecki, who began filming before Assange was released, said he never expected to see him walk around Cannes as a free man.

By inviting Assange, the festival was sending a message about the need for freedom of information and a free press, Jarecki told Reuters, as those values are in decline in many parts of the world according to an index from Reporters without Borders.

The director called Assange "a canary in the coal mine" in foretelling the U.S. government's current moves to exert more control over media access to U.S. President Donald Trump.

"If we had taken that bit more seriously, we might have seen a bunch of this coming," said the U.S. director.

Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told Reuters that the film portrayed the WikiLeaks founder as he should be shown.

"This film is absolutely necessary in terms of telling the story of free speech and what Julian Assange, his case means for the world, not just for him, but for the world," she said.

(Reporting by Hanna Rantala and Miranda Murray; Editing by Sandra Maler)