Khashoggi movie turns into hot potato
Studios are not stepping up to buy controversial doc about slain journalist
Endorsements for a documentary don’t often come from a higher-profile person than Hillary Clinton. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, the former U.S. secretary of state not only turned out for the debut of The Dissident, a new documentary about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, she talked it up afterward.
“If you haven’t seen The Dissident, I hope you will,” Clinton said about the movie, which implicates Saudi Arabia’s rulers in the killing of the Washington Post columnist and slams Western companies for enabling the kingdom’s abuses. Such Hollywood voices as Sean Penn later joined a raft of glowing reviews, making the movie feel like a slam dunk for a content-thirsty distributor.
Yet nearly seven weeks after its Sundance opening, no buyer has stepped up to acquire the film — an unusually long time in a market where most well-regarded movies find deals at the festival or just days after. That reluctance, particularly from global streamers Netflix and Amazon, has raised fears among experts that media companies are acceding to an authoritarian regime and confirming the movie’s very critique that Western companies enable Saudi Arabia’s lawless behaviour.
“Without being inside the companies, it’s hard to know what the factors really are for someone not to distribute the movie,” said Yasmine Farouk, a fellow specializing in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a non-partisan think-tank. “But it wouldn’t at all surprise me if economic and financial interests are the main motivations here. Money has been what’s sustained the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia for 75 years.”
A decorated team of filmmakers has quietly been putting together its own doc about Khashoggi. Kingdom of Silence is produced by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Lawrence Wright, and Oscar-winning documentarian, Alex Gibney. Their movie also centres on the October 2018 Khashoggi death, casting it against the historical backdrop of U.s.-saudi relations.
Filmmakers for that movie have secured the buy-in of Showtime. The Viacomcbs division financed and will air the movie. But they are still seeking a theatrical distributor to give the story an elevated platform in the U.S. — a release freighted with uncertainty.
At a moment when many activists worry that Saudi Arabia’s alleged abuses under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are in danger of fading from public consciousness, U.s.-based Saudi experts say the competition to reignite interest is heartening.
The Dissident has been an especially thorny case. The film’s director, Bryan Fogel, said in January he very much wanted a streaming deal (as opposed to theatrical distribution, which would require piecing together agreements in the U.S. and various international territories). That prompted the film’s sales agent, UTA’S Rena Ronson, to focus Sundance sales efforts on landing one. Netflix distributed Fogel’s previous film, the Russian-whistle-blowing tale Icarus. It won the documentary Oscar and had a significant impact on doping policy as a result of its wide distribution.
Reviews suggested a similar deal was more than plausible for The Dissident. Funded by the Human Rights Foundation, the movie also lays out the findings of UN investigators that Mohammed was personally involved in hacking the cellphone of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, as a potential act of revenge for the mogul’s response to the killing.
Netflix, Amazon and Apple would each be likely distributors, given their frequent pursuit of timely and buzzy documentaries. Each of those firms, experts note, would also have disincentive to buy The Dissident.
Amazon is a prime player in the movie via the alleged Bezos hacking, potentially putting it in a complicated position if it were also to come on as a distributor.
The film also shows the ease with which the iphone could be hacked, potentially dissuading Apple.
And Netflix has capitulated to the Saudi government before, removing an episode of the Hasan Minhaj series Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia last year after the government complained about a joke that suggested Mohammed ordered the killing.