The Dissident

The Dissident examines the disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, and did not come out. As Saudi authorities offered shifting accounts of what happened, the film follows attempts to establish the circumstances of his death and to expose an international effort to contain the fallout. Drawing on testimony from Khashoggi's fiancée Hatice Cengiz, Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz and Turkish prosecutor İrfan Fidan, among others, it also considers the wider cost of speaking out against powerful interests.

Bryan Fogel directed and co-wrote the documentary with Mark Monroe; the two produced it with Thor Halvorssen. It is Fogel's third feature as director, arriving after the comedies Jewtopia and the documentary Icarus. The film runs 119 minutes and was made in the United States and Turkey through Diamond Docs, the Human Rights Foundation and Orwell Productions. It leans on archive material alongside interviews, with Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Agnès Callamard among those appearing.

Released at the end of 2020, the film drew an IMDb rating of 7.8 from roughly 31,000 votes and a critics' rating of 7.9 from 98 reviews, suggesting a broadly favourable critical and popular response. On TMDB its audience rating stands at 7.3 from a much smaller number of votes.