 I've been to the Australian Foreign Minister, it is not a hard task to say to the Americans after all we do for the Americans, we do not want this Australian extradited. If our Prime Minister and our Foreign Minister were to say that to their American counterparts, then I am certain that shame-faced the Americans would drop this extradition attempt. But I cannot believe that our Foreign Minister hasn't got a dinner to say to the US Secretary of State. In the context of all we do for the American Alliance, we want you to drop the extradition of this Australian citizen. Because he's only done one thing that is the basis for this American extradition. And that is, he exposed American war crimes in Iraq. I think there's a profoundly moving film about a man who's had terrible injustice. And it's a very important film about press freedom and democracy and everyone should go and see it. And all the best to Julian. Well it's a real honour to be here to help launch this film about John Shipton's quest to free his son, Julian Assange. By the same token it's a disturbing sign of the times that any father would have to be devoting his life to defending his son's right to tell the truth. Because we all of course raise our children to believe that telling the truth is right and that killing is wrong. Yet here we are, leaving them a world where those who do the killing are above the law and those who tell the truth about it are punished and persecuted. But Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Dave McBride, Stephen Donziger, I could keep going and of course the countless people who are censored, fired, smeared, attacked for daring to question the official narrative of the day. So the Assange president is everywhere and it's dangerous because the case against Julian Assange is all about creating a world where those in power can kill and destroy and do it in secret and do it with impunity and crush anyone who tries to hold them to account. Just like they're crushing Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison right now. And John Shipton said recently very eloquently that the case against Julian is not held up by the law, it's held up by force. And it's illegal Frankenstein's monster of abuses of power all stitched up together lurching around the globe from extraterritorial applications of US laws to state manipulation and fabrications by authorities in Sweden to collusion between British and Swedish prosecutors to dirty deals between the US and Ecuador, the IMF in Ecuador, violations of the laws of asylum, a stream of last minute changing superseding indictments, the latest of which is based on the lies of a convicted fraudster and child sex offender who's openly admitted to fabricating his testimony in return for immunity from the FBI. And now it's widely known that the prosecution spied on Julian Assange's meetings with his lawyers while plotting to kidnap him and or assassinate him. So this is the entity that sits above the law in court in the UK. It's a legal monstrosity, it's an abomination of the law. And this is what John Shipton's been touring the world to try to expose. And this is what we're leaving to our kids, a lawless world where if you see something you better not say something, you shut your mouth or you suffer the consequences. So John Shipton's fight is really all of our fight. Julian Assange's family is all of our fight because either we stand with them or we leave future generations in the dark and at the mercy of unchecked power. So you know people often say well what can I do, I'm just one person, you know every act or every failure to act every day has a ripple effect in the world. You can reach someone who reaches someone who reaches someone and you never know what you've said in train. So if you're watching, be a ripple, come see this film and help it make a splash. Was that him on the phone before? Yeah. Yeah. What are you talking about on a kind of regular basis? If Julian is extradited to the United States to face these charges, he will be the first, but not the last. What are your last bits? That it just collapses under the strain. It looks as though what jailers do for a living is seen to be a criminal act. Gabriel Shipton just had the world premiere of the film Ithaca. Gabriel, thanks for spending a few minutes here with Consorting News. Just tell me quickly, what was the origins of this film? Whose idea was it? When did it come about? So it came about, so in 2019, I went to see Julian. He was he just gone into the prison. He was on suicide watch. He was in a very, you know, I left that day of the prison thinking that I would never see him again, that that could be the last time I see him. So that's when, you know, we started thinking, how can we get a different side of this story out? And then we settled in. John was doing all his advocacy at the time. And we just thought, you know, let's start following John. We've got a camera following John around. And then, yeah, that's how that's how it started. And we filmed with John for, I think, six or seven months before hooking up with the director, Ben Lawrence. And that's when he came on board and we filmed all through the hearings. And yeah, and here we are. So you actually started filming before you got a director? Yes. This was your production, the company you work for? Yeah, yeah. Well, we've done it. You know, I have an independent production company and we've done it all ourselves. Who is the target audience for this film? The target audience for me is, you know, it's an older audience. You know, John has been the protagonist that we'll attract. I think an older audience, sort of like, you know, your average guardian reader who might need to know a bit more and might need an emotional access point to the story, to Julian's persecution, to really, you know, reactivate them and get them to understand what's really going on. I think that's that's our target audience. Is it to counteract or just clearly a concerted effort to spread this information about Sonja and WikiLeaks? Since that Pentagon started in 2008, WikiLeaks published a show that they were doing that? Yeah, you know, well, you know, this is, in a sense, we've created our story, you know, John's story. Some stellar, obviously, is in it as well. So this isn't any kind of propaganda or whatever. We're just trying to be, you know, as truthful as to how John and Stella see this persecution through their eyes, how they experience it as a father and a fiance. How audience we relate to that, I think we saw tonight. Everyone was very emotional and emotionally connected, outraged. So I think, I think, you know, it's doing its job. What is the essential message and how to boil it down on the film? I think the sort of big door message to get people in is the father's 5-3 son, but at the end of the day, I think the message is, you know, the power rests with us. You know, it's up to us to do something. And we see through John, who's a 76-year-old man that even, you know, even if he can keep going and doing something, then we all can. And we can all take, you know, grab on to our democratic rights and really use them before we lose them, basically. So how optimistic are you about the High Court judges' decision? I mean, I think I all I can really do or all we can really do is create the political climate for the charges to be dropped or the High Court to reject an extradition. And then I'm not really optimistic. If you look through history of how Julian's case or how his persecution has been going, you can see, you know, at every step of the way, there's corruption, abuse, torture. I can't see that changing. But what I can see changing is the momentum, you know, momentum politically, like we're now getting things like this film out there, you know, there's 25 organizations in the US that wrote another letter to Mary Garland. So, you know, I think the momentum, the political change is happening. And then the political climate now exists for the High Court to reject the extradition and for Joe Biden to drop the charges. And if the US appeals allow, he doesn't drop the charges. How do you feel about a bail hearing after that? Does he have any chance of bail? If you got it, the Supreme Court, I guess we will be the next step. Yeah, I think two years time. So he can apply to the European Court of Human Rights for bail. Yeah. So he's been on remand for two years and they can apply for the European Court of Human Rights. So that's coming up. And I think, you know, I can't say no, European Court of Human Rights, I don't think they're going to say that Julian should remain in prison. Will Britain honour that execution? Well, you know, it's up to them. But it does look even more subservient to US interests if they don't. There are some people you just can't kill because there are some messages that just cannot be silenced. The truth ultimately cannot be crucified. The truth ultimately will come out. Julian is the public face of our resistance. We will not be silenced. We will not allow them to crucify the messenger. God bless Julian, God bless us all. Do everything, everything, everything you can because we can win this. We can actually win this. It will be so sweet when we do. It will be so, so sweet.