The assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi assassins sparked Bryan Fogel’s decision to direct and produce a documentary about Saudi Arabian efforts to stifle dissent. But even in the U.S. and abroad, Fogel says his own movie has seen the adverse effects of Saudi influence over its own narrative.
“The film is being independently distributed on VOD because not a single streamer would touch this film,” Fogel said. “Not a single major global distributor would touch this film. The reasons are obvious — their business interests their money, the subscriber growth, the investment that Saudi brings into these companies and the shares that they purchase and their publicly traded companies on and on and on, is too big to want to stand up for human rights.
“My first trip to Istanbul was early November 2018,” Fogel said. “I actually didn’t bring a camera. I went there with Jake Swan, my cinematographer, producing partner, and we spent the next five weeks there meeting with the Hatice … and at the same time taking meetings with the Turkish government, building that trust so that they understood that I wasn’t there to exploit the story.”
And while the narrative focuses mostly on Khashoggi and Abdulaziz, a man close to the journalist who sought asylum in Canada, Fogel said the stories in the documentary are just a handful of thousands. Abdulaziz’s brothers, for example, are imprisoned for their connections to him, and women including Loujain al-Hathlou face prison sentences for advocating for women’s rights.
“This was a story because not only were there human lives on the line, there are human lives on the line,” he said. “Thousands of people, 800 beheadings last year, most of these young dissidents. People that sent out a tweet not agreeing with Mohammed bin Salman.”
BriarcliffEnt One of the best documentaries of the decade.
BriarcliffEnt Not in UK yet
BriarcliffEnt So there are many point that were just lies and others were doubtable .. first you are talking about a documentary that you took the facts from hatice cengiz and not from Jamals’s sons and real wife!! But from a women who says is his fiancé so from a women who is Turkish?!
BriarcliffEnt Great documentary!
BriarcliffEnt The director says that the Arab Spring was a good thing, and this is not true because the Arab Spring has caused poverty and sectarian problems in some Arab countries that suffer from poverty, and for your information the film that he directed is baseless .
BriarcliffEnt I fear countries may become more isolated, restricted,and non-transparent. Something is in the air that I can’t put my finger on ,but part of it is the ever changing virus and self centered governments that will not trust America for a long time.