Conspiracy of Silence
THE DISSIDENT I Unpicking the shocking murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi…
The date 2 October 2018 is a date destined to live long in the memory. That day, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul and never came out. There to collect paperwork for his upcoming marriage to Turkish PhD student Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi was brutally murdered. His death sent shockwaves through the world. “The days that followed the story got crazier and crazier,” says Bryan Fogel, whose new film The Dissident traces the aftermath of Khashoggi’s unlawful killing.
As Fogel soon discovered, despite Khashoggi’s close ties with the Saudi royal family, his writing made him an enemy of the state. “His country was silencing him,” Fogel says. “And what he was advocating for was freedom of speech, freedom of press, human rights, women’s rights, some sort of parliamentary democracy in his country, that all power cannot be held by one single person.” His premeditated murder saw him ambushed, suffocated and dismembered inside the Saudi embassy.
Fogel contacted the Washington Post, the paper Khashoggi wrote for, and thanks to his reputation as director of the Oscar-winning doping-in-sport doc Icarus, was given the greenlight to further investigate this horrifying incident. First, it meant gaining the trust of Cengiz. “Because that was the love story. That was the emotional story. That was the story behind the story. That was why somebody would care.”
He spent weeks in Istanbul, getting to know Cengiz “over many, many meetings”, without cameras. “Every time I saw her, I would just cry,” he recalls. “It was emotionally devastating. The two of us bonded and I said, ‘Look, if you trust me, if you will let me do this, I promise I will protect you, I promise I will be your protector, I will never do anything without your permission.’”
Yet Cengiz is just part of a complex web that Fogel untangled. Courting the Turkish authorities, and even securing CCTV recordings from inside the Saudi embassy that contained footage of Khashoggi, Fogel also spent time with Omar Abdulaziz, a fellow Saudi dissident now hiding out in Montreal, Canada. Fogel filmed him for months but left the interviews behind to gain his trust. “I probably left him with $40-50,000 worth of camera cards,” he recalls.
Since completing the film, Fogel has continued to work with Cengiz to shed light on Khashoggi’s murder and the Saudi authorities’ brazen actions. But does he ever worry about his own safety? “There’s always going to be a creak in the ceiling, there’s always going to be a door rattling,” he says. “Making films is my ability to try to bring stories – that might otherwise remain in darkness – to people. So if I start thinking about all the possible outcomes, I don’t think I’d ever be able to do this.”
ETA 5 MARCH / THE DISSIDENT OPENS IN TWO MONTHS.