CULTURE |
FILM
Images: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
He had access to footage from the Turkish police’s forensic search of the meeting
room he was taken to. He has the full, secretly recorded transcripts of his murder, the
killers laughing as they sawed up the body.
While this was happening, Cengiz was waiting for Khashoggi outside.
“They didn’t believe that they were going to be caught,” Fogel says. “All the
measures that they were taking, although they were poorly orchestrated, were
designed to get away with it – a body double, sweeping the conflict for bugs two days
ahead, dismembering his body, cutting and burning it in an oven. These were all
attempts to vanish someone and get away with the crime.”
But the consulate was bugged, though one question Fogel’s film doesn’t answer
is why it was being bugged. “You’d need to ask the Turks about that,” he says. “Who
knows if it was a Turkish listening device, it could have been another country’s and
they could have handed it over to the Turks. I mean, we don’t know. But the point is
that it was there, and his murder was captured.
And if it hadn’t been?
“There would have been a lot of questions. There probably would have been
the belief that he’d been renditioned back to Saudi, but there would have not been
conclusive evidence of the murder. If this was a different country that didn’t have
hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars of wealth, you would have seen different
actions taken,” Fogel says. “I’m not a politician, but measures that pressure the
kingdom to release political prisoners, change their tactics of suppressing freedom of32 | BIGISSUE.COM FROM 01 MARCH 2021Fighting for justice
Cengiz has made sure the world heard
about her fiancée’s Jamal Khashoggi’s
murder; while Fogel (below) and his
film add to the growing outragen October 2 2018 at 1.14pm local
time Jamal Khashoggi entered
the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
He was never seen again.
The Dissident tells the story of
how Khashoggi went from being a trusted insider
of the Saudi government to one of its biggest
critics – and one targeted for assassination.
“Jamal’s murder was able to happen because
the Saudis didn’t believe that there would be true
accountability, and there wasn’t,” says director
Bryan Fogel.
His film is a resolute and relentless
presentation of the facts of the case, including
evidence never publicly revealed.
Fogel’s previous documentary, Icarus, told
the unbelievable inside story of the Russian
doping scandal and won him an Oscar. He brings
the same commitment and consideration to
the even more incredulous story of the life and
horrifying death of the 59-year-old Washington
Post correspondent.
Tonally, the film is constructed as a thriller.
How could it not be when it involves international
espionage involving some of the most powerful
men in the world? But it is also a love story.
Fogel humanises Khashoggi and his fiancée
Hatice Cengiz. It was to pick up documents for
their wedding that brought Khashoggi to the
consulate that day.
“We crafted the film as a cinematic thriller
and Hatice is the emotional connection,” Fogel
explains. “To get an audience to care about a
story you need them to care about the people in
the story. With Jamal not being able to raise his
voice because he’s not here, Hatice is the living
representative of that.”
In uncompromising detail, Fogel’s film
outlines what happened when Khashoggi walked
into the consulate and, minutes later, was killed.O
A tough time
to be talking
truth to power