Jewish director wins first ever Golden Globe for a documentary
Eugene Jarecki scoops award for The Six Billion Dollar Man
The first ever Golden Globe for a documentary has been won by the Jewish film-maker son of a Holocaust survivor.
Eugene Jarecki was presented this week with the award for The Six Billion Dollar Man, for which he also won the prestigious L’Oeil d’Or prize at Cannes. Currently on show at the Curzon Bloomsbury, the film tells the story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in spy thriller format, and was described by Time Out as “the most chilling film of 2025″.
The prize, founded by the Golden Globes and Artemis Rising Foundation, honours a non-fiction filmmaker whose work “demonstrates both exceptional creative merit and keen potential to inspire positive social change”.
For multiple Emmy and Sundance Festival award-winner Jarecki, the film attracting a spate of five-star reviews is the latest in a list of documentaries he has directed about social justice warriors and those who try to silence them.
He credits his Holocaust heritage with fuelling his compulsion to seek truth in his films: “Based on my father’s family fleeing Germany and my mother’s fleeing Czarist Russia, as children we were all taught that we were children of flight,” he told the Jewish News after picking up his latest gong in Hollywood. “And,” he adds, in an oblique nod to the recent rise of worldwide antisemitism, “because societies can change in the darkest ways overnight, it was incumbent upon us to apply the lessons from our own experience to the defence of others who were being persecuted.”
His first preoccupation was with the fallout from slavery in the land where his parents fled to freedom. “It was natural for Jews fleeing persecution in Europe to find common cause with the African-American struggle in America – people who had been enslaved, just as the Jews had been enslaved in Egypt; they were singing ‘Go Down Moses’.
“So social justice causes, particularly those relating to the African-American struggle, were the starting point for me in the development of my political sensitivity. When I became a filmmaker, I did it largely as a way to express my passion for asking of America — demanding even — that she live up to her founding ideals.”
Jarecki’s film-making career was preceded by a spell in politics after graduating from Princeton, during which he was invited to visit Guantanamo Bay as part of a US State Department delegation. He captured a hunger strike ensuing among migrants claiming unfair detention, cementing his commitment to a life documenting contentious issues. Henry Kissinger was one of his first targets, but he proved himself as a master of lighter subjects in The King, a 2017 documentary about Elvis which attracted a Grammy nomination for Best Music Film.
Eugene is not the only award-winning film-maker in his family – his Oscar-nominated brother Andrew has won 18 international film awards and an Emmy for his own efforts. And it is not only two of his three siblings who became immersed in the industry – his mother Gloria was a former film critic at Time Magazine.
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