Alex Gibney Directs New HBO Doc on al-Qaeda

NEW YORK: Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney has adapted Lawrence Wright’s one-man play My Trip to al-Qaeda, with the exclusive HBO documentary to air on September 7.

The doc chronicles fundamentalist Islam’s rise to power. This comes from a firsthand account of Wright’s experience in researching his 2006 book The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The travelogue combines first-person narrative with documentary footage and photographs. My Trip to al-Qaeda features interviews with Yassir al-Sirri, who killed a 12-year-old girl while trying to assassinate the Egyptian prime minister and later escaped to freedom in the U.K.; Maajid Nawaz, a once-jailed Muslim who describes the torture techniques that turned intellectuals like Ayman al-Zawahiri into radicals; Ali Salem, a playwright who imagines the “kindergarten of hate” that schools Muslim youth; and Jamal Khalifa, a Saudi businessman who was married to Bin Laden’s sister and was killed in 2007.

HBO Documentary Films presents the doc in association with Jigsaw Productions. It is directed by Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), produced by Gibney and Wright, along with Alison Ellwood, Alexandra Johnes and Kendall McCarthy. Executive producers are Patricia Barnes Matthews and Dana O’Keefe.