FULL INSIDE STORY ON THE MURDER OF KHASHOGGI
Oscar-winning documentary maker Bryan Fogel’s latest film The Dissident charts the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia. Here, he talks to The Herald on Sunday about how the repressive regime has tried to undermine his work – and the need for the international community to bring Riyadh to heel
SCOTTISH audiences should consider themselves lucky that they’ll be able to watch Bryan Fogel’s new documentary The Dissident, about the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, this weekend. If Saudi Arabia had its way the film would have sunk without trace.
Oscar winner Fogel believes the regime exerted influence on major film distributors, like Netflix, to not show the documentary globally.
The kingdom’s intelligence services also used their infamous troll army to attack the film – which investigates how the Crown Prince of Saudi orchestrated the murder of dissident journalist Khashoggi – on online movie review sites to damage its credibility and turn audiences away.
The release of the film – which has its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend – comes as America imposes sanctions on Saudis connected to the murder. The CIA has concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – known as MBS – approved the assassination of Khasshoggi.
The journalist was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Washington stopped short of imposing sanctions on MBS, the future Saudi king, although several members of the hit squad which killed Khashoggi were targeted. Pressure is now mounting on the UK to end unrestricted arms sales to Saudi.
President Joe Biden’s administration has promised a halt in arms sales to Riyadh, which could be used in the long-running war in Yemen. Britain is among Saudi’s closest allies – and is the world’s second-largest arms exporter to the kingdom.
As The Dissident premiers in Scotland this weekend, director Bryan Fogel – who won an Oscar for his last documentary, Icarus, about the Russian “Olympic doping” scandal – sat down with The Herald on Sunday, from his Californian beachside home, to discuss the assassination of Khashoggi, the lethal power of Saudi, and the need for democracy to stand up to tyranny.
The film
FOGEL’S film, stylish and horrifying in equal measure, is one of the slickest, most powerful documentaries of recent years. Essentially, viewers learn this: Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi insider who became one of the most influential journalists in the kingdom. However, he was also a reformer who became increasingly critical of the regime. Eventually, seen as a dissident, he fled the country for America where he worked for The Washington Post, and continued highlighting Saudi’s repression of freedom and abuses of human rights.
As an indicator of “justice” in Saudi, in one day alone in 2019, the kingdom carried out mass beheadings of 37 citizens – mostly from the Shia minority – convicted of terrorism in trials which Amnesty International branded a “sham” based on confessions extracted under