New documentary ‘The Bibi Files’ paints an unflattering portrait of Netanyahu. Will Israelis ever see it?

A new documentary about Benjamin Netanyahu premiered at a major film festival this week, at a moment when he is facing intense global scrutiny. But filmgoers in the Israeli prime minister’s own country may never get to see it.

That’s because “The Bibi Files,” produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, makes extensive use of leaked police interrogation tapes from Netanyahu’s ongoing, years-long corruption scandals — footage that is illegal to screen in Israel. But it’s still causing controversy in Israel and testing its restrictive media laws. 

In an attempt to block the film’s release, Netanyahu this week sued the state of Israel and Raviv Drucker, an Israeli journalist he has long seen as a thorn in his side and who serves as a producer on the film. The suit claimed that the film violated Israeli law by making use of unapproved interrogation footage. It claimed that Drucker, a credited producer on the film who has published damning investigations of Netanyahu, was the leaker (which the filmmakers deny).

But a judge dismissed his case, because it was filed hours before the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday. The version that premiered in Toronto was a work-in-progress cut of “The Bibi Files,” and had been added to the festival schedule only days before. 

Those in attendance described a searing indictment of its subject, with some issuing a plea for the film to make its way, somehow, to Israeli audiences. (Transcripts of the interrogations themselves have previously leaked to the press.)

​​“Take this film and airdrop it over Israel,” one supportive audience member said, according to a Deadline account. “Because otherwise, I’m afraid people won’t be able to see it there.”

The film currently has a sales agent but no distributor. Bloom told the Toronto crowd she was still working on figuring out the ending. The film festival’s opening night was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, who said the Royal Bank of Canada — a main sponsor of the festival that has also been targeted by Canada’s Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement for its dealings in Israel — “funds genocide.”

Earlier this week, thousands of Israelis thought they would be able to watch the film after all, via a channel on the social media platform Telegram that promised a “complete and exclusive copy” of the movie. Those who joined the channel reportedly included former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who appears in the doc (and was himself convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges).

But according to Israeli media, the founder of the channel backtracked on that promise after uploading a few clips (including one where Netanyahu reportedly says, “Liars!” and bangs on the table), citing “a legal restriction at the moment in Israel, by agreement with the source.”

The film has become the latest flashpoint in an Israeli media climate that, according to the World Press Freedom Index, has only gotten more restrictive since the outbreak of war with Hamas. Israeli officials in recent months have briefly confiscated Associated Press equipment and shut down Al-Jazeera’s operations in the country, in both cases claiming the organizations were publishing information that supported Hamas or endangered Israeli troops. On Thursday, Israel announced it would revoke the press credentials of individual Al-Jazeera journalists. 

Additionally, analyses of Israeli media reporting on the war in Gaza have shown that Israelis rarely see footage of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. (Palestinian news sources, by contrast, have shown little of Israeli suffering on Oct. 7, 2023, or afterward.)

Meanwhile, a pro-Netanyahu influence effort has allegedly proffered false Israeli intelligence to international news outlets as part of an influence campaign to justify his wartime leadership. The Jewish Chronicle, a British Jewish newspaper that initially reported on the false intelligence, said on Thursday that it was investigating the credentials of a reporter who covered the purported intelligence.

In recent weeks, Netanyahu has faced mounting street protests drawing hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are opposed to what they see as his recalcitrance in ending the war and bringing Israeli hostages home. But the nearly year-old war isn’t the focus of “The Bibi Files.” Instead, the film covers another Netanyahu scandal that has received far less attention abroad and has faded even in the minds of Israelis: his multiple trials for corruption, which have been ongoing for years. 

In the film, director Alexis Bloom focuses on the corruption cases that long predate the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. The police footage comes from interrogations of Netanyahu conducted between 2016 and 2018 and focuses on the extensive allegations that he engaged in bribery and political favors during earlier stints as prime minister. 

“You could see this pattern of democratic backsliding going on worldwide,” Bloom told the audience following the screening. “You see parallels with what’s going on in Israel, in Hungary, in Russia, with this sort of strongman syndrome. That’s what interested me.”

Bloom could not immediately be reached for comment, while requests for comment to Gibney’s production company were not returned. Gibney’s extensive filmography includes previous explorations of Israeli state secrets: his 2016 documentary “Zero Days” was an investigation of the American-Israeli malware program Stuxnet, which targeted Iran’s nuclear program.

To Bloom, whose previous films include documentaries about Roger Ailes and WikiLeaks, the interrogation footage was a key part of the portrait of Netanyahu in wartime. 

“Those recordings shed light on Netanyahu’s character in a way that is unprecedented and extraordinary,” she told Variety ahead of the film’s screening. “They are powerful evidence of his venal and corrupt character and how that led us to where we are at right now.””

And it’s not just Bibi himself in the footage. Other Netanyahu family members and allies are also interrogated. Netanyahu’s wife Sara and son Yair, outspoken figures in Israeli discourse who are seen as villains by many of Netayahu’s critics, feature in the film; so do pro-Israel Republican megadonors Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, as well as Israeli billionaire and Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan, who is central to the corruption allegations. 

Bloom, whose father is Jewish and who was born in South Africa but is now based in the United States, uses the footage to paint Netanyahu as craven and power-hungry. She links his attempts to evade his corruption charges to his handling of the war in Gaza. The film also links Netanyahu’s fight against the corruption charges to his other heavily scrutinized decisions in the lead-up to the attacks — including his alliances with far-right parties in his governing coalition, and his endorsement of a controversial and so far unsuccessful plan to weaken the Israeli court system.

She and Gibney said that the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack motivated them to finish as much of the film as they could, hoping to turn public tide against Netanyahu and push him out of power.

“We felt it was important, and frankly, our duty as world citizens to make our story known as soon as possible because people are dying every day,” Gibney told Variety.