Real-life murder most foul in Istanbul

The Dissident

Cast: Jamal Khashoggi, friends and supporters Director: Bryan Fogel

Duration: 1 h 59 m Available: On demand

With its frantic pacing, lively camerawork and (sadly overused) digital glitch effects, the new documentary The Dissident could easily be mistaken for a Jason Bourne-type thriller. The difference is that in this story, a real person faces death at the hands of a corrupt state.

The murder of Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi during a routine visit to his country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018 sent shock waves around the world. There was CCTV footage of the 59-year-old entering the building to obtain documents for his planned marriage, but that was the last time he was seen.

Reports by the local police, the CIA and the UN held that the government of Saudi Arabia and its leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered the killing. Not surprisingly, the U.S. president refused to believe the truth, telling journalists Khashoggi's death was “a shame, but it is what it is.”

Director Bryan Fogel, whose 2017 film Icarus (about Russia's role in sports doping), won an Oscar, chooses not to focus too heavily on the president's response. In fact, while he lays out the facts of the murder in fascinating and grim detail, his film's greatest achievement is to humanize the victim.

Khashoggi was by all accounts a patriot and a deeply lonely man, whose criticism of the Saudi government led to him entering self-imposed exile in 2017. He started writing for The Washington Post in September of that year, and the following May met Hatice Cengiz, his future fiancée, at a conference in Istanbul.

The film interviews other Saudi activists in exile. In one eerie scene, Montreal resident Omar Abdulaziz Alzaharani describes how Saudi officials tried to convince him to return to his homeland, or at least to its embassy in Canada to renew documents. He refused, and later learned his brother and many friends had been arrested back home.

Khashoggi had friends in the Saudi expat community, and seemed to enjoy engaging with a younger generation of social-media-savvy critics. One interview subject notes that, with its high degree of uptake in Saudi Arabia, “Twitter became the parliament of the Arabs.”

I concluded this film angry at the notion of political assassination, but also saddened by the loss of a gentle soul. ★★★ ½

Jamal Khashoggi