The Bibi Files documentary that tried to ban Netanyahu

In fly-on-the-wall documentary Bibi filesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commonly known as Bibi, is seen during hours of questioning by Israeli police on accusations of corruption for which he is now being tried. Footage of his interrogation is interspersed with police interviews with wealthy associates, including Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who complain about the prime minister and his wife demanding expensive gifts.

But in addition to its voyeuristic appeal, the film illuminates the thesis from which Netanyahu’s actions are based his alliance with the extreme right Israeli politicians who intend by overturning the country’s judicial system to continuation of the ongoing war in Gaza— all this may be related to his attempts to avoid the charges brought against him. “The engine is corruption cases,” says Raviv Drucker, an Israeli investigative journalist, early on Bibi fileswhich he co-produced. “And it all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law… After the disaster on October 7, the war became another tool to stay in power.”

Netanyahu has strongly denied corruption charges — most recently in court, where he testified for the first time on Tuesday, calling them “total lies.” The Likud party leader said the judicial reform legislation did not affect his criminal case and argued that the war in Gaza was only continuing in an effort to eliminate Hamas as a threat. “This rumor, this narrative that I am dragging out the war, is not true,” Netanyahu told TIME in August. interview. “My trial has been going on for three years. It is absolutely independent of what happens from the outside.”

Continue reading: Netanyahu is at war

TIME caught up with director Alexis Bloom, whose previous projects include Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes and We Steal Secrets: The WikiLeaks Storyto discuss how the film came to be, Netanyahu’s unsuccessful attempts to block its international release (the film is banned in Israel under the country’s privacy laws), and the impact she hopes it will have when liberated December 11. The conversation has been edited and shortened for clarity.

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TIME: Can you tell us a little bit about how this film came about? Did it all start with the leaked footage of the interrogation?

FLOWERING: Yes, the interrogation video was given to (producer) Alex Gibney around the spring of 2023. Someone approached him on Signal and said, “I have some interesting material. Do you want to look at it?” Alex, through him long career in investigative journalism, many people contact him. Some of it is legal and some of it is not, but to his credit he still pulls the strings. He came to me in the summer of 2023 and said: “We have these materials. I’m not entirely sure of the extent of all this. I know some of the people who are there,” meaning Benjamin, his wife, Sarah, and those closest to him. “You’re interested in looking at the materials, trying to understand them, and let’s try to make a movie together.”

Were you following the situation in Israel at the time—the corruption charges hanging over Netanyahu, the protests over the controversial judicial reform?

I haven’t been to Israel for a while, so I wasn’t there when The Supreme Court protests were happening, but I followed it on the news. I always saw this as a kind of radical backsliding, and (Netanyahu’s) alliance with the far right was certainly visible even before October 7th.

The film juxtaposes Netanyahu’s rise to power with his legal troubles, which the film notes back in 1997. How important was it to include context about his family history and his political evolution?

Unfortunately, we did not have time to delve into his biography in detail. This is already a two-hour film and a commitment. The part of the biography that was important deals with Yoni Netanyahu, his brother, his brother’s death, and the beginning of Netanyahu’s career as “Mr. Security”, as a counter-terrorism expert, was important to include as it has direct relevance to today; Netanyahu said, “I am the only one who can protect Israel,” which I now find extremely ironic given how dangerous a place Israel is for a Jew to live.

Both the prime minister’s wife Sara and their eldest son Yair appear as key players in the corruption scandal. How important are they to the story?

I wouldn’t include the family if it wasn’t very important politically. They are crucial in terms of who gets appointed and who doesn’t, what Benjamin Netanyahu’s priorities are and how he conducts himself in government. They are not elected, but they have a lot of power, and this is well known in Israel. I believe that all the documentaries made about Bibi in current affairs talk about him as a single leader, but he is not. This is a person with a very open, involved, interested family.

From the point of view of corruption cases, they are both very important in different ways. Sarah is important in Case 1000including $200,000 worth of jewelry, cigars, and champagne, because many of those items (allegedly) went to her. And Yair is very important in Case 4000, where there is (allegedly) a quid pro quo between Benjamin and Shaul Elovich, who is the head of a huge telecommunications company in Israel, and Yair was (said to be) the person who told Benjamin Netanyahu about what was posted on this website called Wallawhich the family eventually took control of.

The situation with Wallaand the Netanyahu family’s sensitivity to how they are portrayed in the wider press is one of the film’s key plot points. More recently, the Israeli government imposed sanctions in the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretzthrough critical coverage of the war in Gaza and comments from the newspaper’s publisher. What do these moves tell us about how Netanyahu feels about the press?

Netanyahu wants to control the message. He is obsessed with the media, and so is his wife. There is no one in Israel who would say otherwise. … When you see him on the world stage (as the press secretary of the Israeli embassy in Washington), it is through the media. He does not conduct an election campaign on a mass level. He campaigns using his perfect English, his baritone and his good looks. This is how he becomes famous. So the genesis of Netanyahu can be seen through this lens. He is an actor. He’s a master performer, and he’s extremely sensitive to coverage, so we thought it important to include this story about Walla. When we showed our film as a work-in-progress in Toronto, he immediately went to court to try to block it.

At this point, being an Israeli journalist who disagrees with Netanyahu is very dangerous. Netanyahu asked the police open an investigation at Raviv Drucker, who is the character of our film. The Rav has already sued Netanyahu, but now (right-wing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar) Ben-Gvir is in charge of the police, so the risk is significant. Except Haaretzthey try to suppress any criticism of the current government in the Israeli press.

The film shows Netanyahu’s performance art. But it also shows his limits, particularly in a montage where he repeats the phrase “I don’t remember” ad nauseum to the investigators. How many hours of footage did you have to sift through to create this?

The “I don’t remember” sequence has been three times longer over the centuries. People begged me to cut it. I thought we should make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the police investigators, perhaps, because of his denial. I was forced to shorten it by the more severe impulses of my editor.

We have over 1,000 hours of video footage. We are a small team and we didn’t get to see it all. I had to very quickly identify the cases he was eventually charged with and sort of fix the rest. There were a lot of other investigations and a lot of other things that the investigators were talking to people about – I couldn’t physically watch it all.

The film will not be shown in Israel due to privacy laws. How do you hope this will affect the country despite these restrictions? I know this is covered in the Israeli press.

The film has already been widely pirated in Israel. It’s like a forest fire. It is passed between people in WhatsApp chats because everyone in Israel uses WhatsApp. My colleagues let me know when they were texted, “You want to see Bibi files?”

I mean, people actually want to watch it. We didn’t do anything to encourage it – for legal reasons we never would. But we conducted an online screening in a private community. I think someone recorded it. Digital information is like water—it just flows.

Sometimes references to it appear on X or other platforms. How hard is it to remove secret links?

You should hire a digital security company. At first we didn’t have money for all this. People have asked me, “Did you get a lot of money for this?” I’m like, on the contrary. We were in the red. And luckily, just before Thanksgiving, an anonymous donor gave us some money to help pay these people to remove the links. So I can’t stress enough how small and tiny our team is, which actually gives me a lot of satisfaction because it’s kind of the opposite of Netanyahu and his system. We are small and mighty. We try to be.

Can we say that all the interest in this film, paradoxically enough, has cost you?

We want the film to go mainstream. There is a big difference between being widely pirated in Israel and being watched by non-Jews in New York. I want every politically minded person—anyone interested in corruption, politics, international affairs—to watch it. There are parallels here with Trump. The challenge for us now will be to push this into the mainstream.

What does this process look like?

We had already been in Los Angeles for a week at the Oscar screening at Laemmle in Santa Monica. We open for a week at IFC in New York. And then it’s available on Jolt.film in the US and Canada, so you can go online, pay your money—it’s $18 right now, but it’ll be $12—and watch the movie without any subscription. So it’s a very mainstream, democratic way of watching a movie. We don’t have a big streamer behind us. …Streamers thought it was too controversial to broadcast. They don’t want to talk about Israel and Palestine in any iteration. There is a great movie called “There is no other land”, which wins prizes. It’s a great movie, but it’s not released in the (USA). why not

It’s surprising given how relevant your story is, and especially given that your film is less about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than other recent films such as No Other Land andTeacher» and more about the corruption scandal surrounding Netanyahu.

It’s a fairly simple, straightforward film about the depravity of one family, and it doesn’t go into the more contentious territory of what to do after he’s gone, or the complicity of Israeli society at large, or any of those issues. So I hope that anyone who is against corruption, who will stand up and say that corruption among our leaders is bad, can watch this movie.

The film ends abruptly because the story of the corruption scandal is not over yet. Netanyahu has used the war as an excuse to delay the trial, so it remains to be seen when it will end. Are you planning on revisiting the story when that happens?

We have no plans to formally pursue this in the film. You need funding, a backer and all, so there are some practical considerations before you can commit to making another film, part two. But personally and professionally, I’m still following this story.

Has the Netanyahu family approached you or your team directly?

We haven’t heard of Netanyahu. We invited an interview. Surprisingly, we didn’t get it.

What impact do you hope to have outside of Israel?

It would be very helpful for the international community to understand that Netanyahu is not Israel and that criticizing Netanyahu is a perfectly valid thing to do. Criticizing him is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel.