"Jamal was one of our own. He was murdered by the regime he criticized," Rick Rowley told us this afternoon at a Council on Foreign Relations Zoom session. Rowley, a former war correspondent and award-winning filmmaker, is the director of the recently released, "Kingdom of Silence," a Showtime documentary about the literal butchering of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's henchmen.
The film borrows its title from Lawrence Wright's legendary 2003 article in The New Yorker. I remember that piece well, coming as it did not long after 9/11 and revealing a Saudi Arabia that its leaders do not want known. Wright is an executive producer of the film and was a close colleague of Khashoggi.
Rowley said he approached the project as a "murder mystery, indicating that many of the people he wanted to interview for the project were "terrified" and would not speak with him. "Radical regimes turn people into cowards," said Rowley, "but Jamal was no coward." As the film reveals, however, Khashoggi's background was far more complicated and vexing than is known on the surface.
Denied a production visa by Saudi officials, Rowley and his team entered Saudi Arabia on tourist visas and filmed parts of the project surreptitiously. Let's face it; real and would-be autocrats despise the media because they reveal them for the corrupt, vengeful narcissists they are, whether it's in Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United States.
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