It started in the spring of 2023, when veteran documentary film director and producer Alex Gibney received a message on Signal containing a sample of Israeli police interrogation footage. Whoever sent the footage to Gibney, who has made several films about political corruption such as We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013) and Citizen K (2019), believed he would be interested in making something out of the content.
Gibney does not speak Hebrew but as he began to have the footage translated and go through it with Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, he learned that the footage was from interrogations related to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption charges.
This footage laid the groundwork for The Bibi Files, a new documentary which had its world premiere last week at the DOC NYC film festival.
In total, Gibney received hundreds of hours of police interrogation footage of Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his closest allies, dating all the way back to 2016. Prominent figures in the footage include Netanyahu’s wife Sarah, his son Yair, Israeli businessman Shaul Elovitch, film producer Aaron Milchan, and the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021.
In the summer of 2023, when Gibney and director Alexis Bloom first started constructing the film, protests in Israel against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms were at their peak. What the filmmakers could not have anticipated was the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and all that was to follow.
“I think it became evident very quickly that the petty corruption that began the case had evolved into a kind of monumental corruption that was taking us all to the brink of World War III,” Gibney said at the premiere’s Q&A at the IFC Theater in New York.
The filmmakers and editors used the interrogation material to create a thorough picture of how the initial bribery allegations against Netanyahu led to the creation of the most far-right government in Israel’s history.
In addition to the interrogation footage, the film contains interviews with an impressive list of subjects. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu’s childhood best friend Uzi Beller, former confidant Nir Hefez, and even former bodyguard and housekeeper Meni Neftali all weigh in on the subject of Netanyahu’s corruption.
In addition to discussing the bribery charges, many describe a growing sense of entitlement among the family, specifically after the 2015 election, which Netanyahu won in an unexpected landslide. This entitlement was limited not just to political power, but to luxury goods and other items they could not easily access. This, according to witnesses, was where their wealthy circle of friends became important and the bribery began.
The film’s sharp editing, which juxtaposes footage of the Netanyahus claiming ignorance in interrogations against interview subjects detailing how intimately involved Bibi and Sarah were with arranging bribes, highlights the Netanyahus’ feelings of invulnerability. Despite photos of their luxurious lifestyle, Netanyahu maintains to interrogators, “We have no pleasures in life.” Netanyahu, along with his wife and son, repeatedly accuse the police and the media of working together in a conspiracy to sow doubt in the public and stage a military coup by falsifying elaborate bribes.
The tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, cars full of champagne, and smuggled cigars may feel like they belong to a crime thriller, but the filmmakers make a concerted effort to avoid sensationalism. Bloom even referenced having to cut footage of Elovitch saying vulgarities involving “male genitalia and lubricants,” although how this came up in his interrogation, she would not say.
This is unfortunate, not just because it leaves some unanswered questions, but because it could have provided at least a brief moment of comic relief from a dark tale.
The film also explores Netanyahu’s orders to Qatar to donate money to Hamas, his seemingly cozy relationship with far-right extremists, and his political moves to protect his presidency as much as possible in the face of his legal battle. Moves that ultimately, many of the interviewees argue, have left the country and its democracy incredibly vulnerable.
The filmmakers are well aware of how familiar this story may feel to American audiences.
“You have somebody accused of many crimes who wants to elude consequences for those crimes and as a result, turns to rapaciously immoral pleas to demonize the outsider in order to be able to surround himself with a political mandate, to be able to escape any consequence for what he did,” Gibney said, speaking on the parallels between Netanyahu and Trump.
“I was kind of gobsmacked actually watching it in terms of the sort of the eeriness of how a society can eat away at itself and allow itself to become slowly undemocratic, particularly in the face of a messianic and very charismatic leader who’s becoming increasingly corrupt.”
Because of national privacy laws, the interrogation footage cannot be legally screened in Israel and the film cannot be distributed there.
The film arrives while Israel’s war and Netanyahu’s trial are still ongoing, as America is preparing for what will surely be an unpredictable next four years. Still, the filmmakers allow for some optimism.
“All the people on screen have enormous integrity and are very clear-sighted,” said Bloom, “and if anything gives me hope, it’s that, that there’s still extremely insightful people engaging with this.”
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