In the fly-on-the-wall documentary The Bibi Files, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, universally known as Bibi, is seen undergoing hours of questioning by Israeli police over the corruption allegations for which he is now on trial. The 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 of the prime minister and his wife demanding expensive gifts.
But beyond its voyeuristic appeal, the film makes the case that Netanyahu’s actions—from his alliance with the far-right fringe of Israeli politics who are intent on upending the country’s judicial system to prolonging the ongoing war in Gaza—can all be tied to his efforts to evade the charges against him. “The engine is the corruption cases,” Raviv Drucker, an Israeli investigative journalist says at the start of The Bibi Files, which he co-produced. “And it all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law…After the catastrophe of the 7th of October, the war became another instrument to stay in power.”
Netanyahu has emphatically denied the corruption charges—most recently at the trial, where he testified for the first time on Tuesday, calling them “a complete lie.” The Likud Party leader has stated that the judicial reform legislation does not affect his criminal case, and maintained that the Gaza war is prolonged only by the effort to eliminate Hamas as a threat. “This canard, this narrative that I’m prolonging the war is false,” Netanyahu told TIME in an August interview. “My trial has been going on for three years. It’s totally independent of what is happening on the outside.”
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TIME caught up with director Alexis Bloom, whose previous projects include Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, to discuss how the film came together, Netanyahu’s unsuccessful efforts to block its screening internationally (the film is banned from being shown in Israel in accordance with the country’s privacy laws), and the impact she hopes it will have once it’s released on Dec. 11. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
TIME: Can you talk a bit about how this film came together? Did it all start with the leaked interrogation footage?
BLOOM: Yes, the interrogation videos were leaked to [producer] Alex Gibney around the spring of 2023. Somebody approached him on Signal and said, “I have some interesting material. Would you like to look at it?” Alex, because of his long career in investigative journalism, gets a lot of people contacting him. Some of them are legitimate and some of them are not, but to his credit he still tugs on threads. He approached me in the summer of 2023 and said, “We have these materials. I’m not entirely sure of the scope of it all. I know some of the people that are on there,” meaning Benjamin, his wife Sara, and the inner circle. “Are you interested in looking at the materials, trying to make sense of them, and let’s try and make a film together.”
At that point, had you been following the situation in Israel—the corruption charges hanging over Netanyahu, the protests over the contentious judicial reform?
I hadn’t been in Israel for a while, so I hadn’t been there when the Supreme Court protests were happening, but I was following it in the news. I had always thought about it as a kind of radical backsliding, and [Netanyahu’s] alliance with the extreme right was certainly notable, even prior to Oct. 7.
The film weaves together Netanyahu’s rise to power with his legal entanglements, which as the film notes date as far back as 1997. How important was it to include context about his family history and his political evolution?
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to go into his biography in great length. It’s already a two-hour film and a commitment. The part of the biography that was important was around Yoni Netanyahu, his brother, and his brother’s death and the launching of Netanyahu’s career as “Mr. Security,” as the expert against terrorism, was important to include because it has a direct link with today; with Netanyahu saying, “I am the only one who can protect Israel,” which I find supremely ironic now, considering what a dangerous place Israel is for a Jewish person to live.
Both the prime minister’s wife, Sara, and their eldest son, Yair, feature as key players in the corruption scandal. How important are they to this story?
I wouldn’t have included the family had they not been very important in political terms. They are crucial in terms of who gets appointed, who doesn’t get appointed, and what Benjamin Netanyahu’s priorities are and how he handles himself in government. They are not elected, but they have a lot of power, and that is well known in Israel. I find that in all the documentaries done about Bibi in current affairs, it talks about him as this singular leader—and he’s not. He is a man with a very outspoken, involved, engaged family.
In terms of the corruption cases, they are both very important in different ways. Sara is important in Case 1000, involving the jewelry, the cigars and the champagne, $200,000 worth, because a lot of these goods [allegedly] went to her. And Yair is very important in Case 4000, which is where there’s [allegedly] a quid pro quo between Benjamin and Shaul Elovitch, who’s the head of a huge telecommunications company in Israel, and Yair was [said to be] the person telling Benjamin Netanyahu what was being put out on this website called Walla, that the family ultimately took control of.
The situation with Walla, and the Netanyahu family’s sensitivity about how they’re portrayed in the press more broadly, is one of the key plot points of the film. More recently, the Israeli government imposed sanctions on the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, over its critical coverage of the war in Gaza and comments by the paper’s publisher. What do these moves tell us about how Netanyahu thinks about the press?
Netanyahu wants to control the message. He is obsessed with the media, and so is his wife. There is nobody in Israel who would say otherwise. … When you see his entrance onto the world stage [as spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington], it’s through the media. He doesn’t campaign on a grassroots level. He campaigns using his perfect English and his baritone voice and his good looks. That is how he becomes famous. So the genesis of Netanyahu can be seen through this lens. He’s an actor. He is a master of performance, and he’s incredibly sensitive to coverage, and that’s why we felt 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 and block it.
At the moment, it is a very dangerous place to be an Israeli journalist who disagrees with Netanyahu. Netanyahu has asked the police to open an investigation into Raviv Drucker, who is a character in our film. Raviv has been sued by Netanyahu before, but now [right-wing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir is head of the police, so the risk is significant. Apart from Haaretz, they’re trying to quash any criticism of the current government in the press in Israel.
The film captures Netanyahu’s art of performance. But it also shows its limits—particularly in the montage where he repeats the phrase “I don’t remember” ad nauseum to investigators. How many hours of footage did you have to sift through to create that?
The “I don’t remember” sequence was three times as long for ages. People were begging me to cut it down. I was like, we have to make the audience as uncomfortable as the police investigators must have been with his denials. I was compelled by the more rigorous impulses of my editor to cut it down.
We have over 1,000 hours of footage. We’re a tiny team, and we didn’t get to watch it all. I very quickly had to identify the cases which he was ultimately indicted for and sort of fiddle out the rest. There were a lot of other investigations and a lot of other stuff that the investigators talked to people about—I couldn’t physically watch all of that.
The film won’t be shown in Israel due to privacy laws. What impact are you hoping it’ll have in the country, those restrictions notwithstanding? I know it’s being covered by the Israeli press.
The film has already been widely pirated in Israel. It’s like wildfire. It’s being passed along in WhatsApp chats between people, because everyone in Israel uses WhatsApp. Colleagues of mine let me know when they’ve been sent a message saying, “Do you want to see The Bibi Files?”
I mean, people really want to watch it. We’ve done nothing to encourage it—for legal reasons, we never would. But we did one community screening online that was a private community screening. I think someone must have recorded that. Digital information is like water—it just flows.
Sometimes links to it appear on X or other platforms. How difficult is it to remove the clandestine links?
You have to employ a digital security company. We didn’t have the money for any of this, initially. People have asked me, “Did you get a lot of money for this?” I’m like, the opposite. We’ve been in the red. And thankfully, just before Thanksgiving, an anonymous donor gave us some money to help pay for these people to take down links. So I can’t emphasize enough how small and scrappy our team is, which gives me great pleasure, actually, because it’s sort of the opposite of Netanyahu and his system. We are small and mighty. We try to be.
Is it fair to say that all of the interest in this film, paradoxically, has cost you?
We want the film to cross over to a mainstream audience. There’s a big difference between it being widely pirated in Israel and for people in New York who are not Jewish to watch it. I want every politically-minded person—anyone interested in corruption, in politics, in international affairs—to watch it. It has parallels with Trump. The challenge for us now will be to push it out into the mainstream.
What does that process look like?
We’ve already been open in LA for an Oscar-qualifying run at the Laemmle in Santa Monica for a week. We’re opening for a week at the IFC in New York City. And then it’s on Jolt.film in the U.S. and Canada, so you can go online, pay your money—at the moment it’s $18, but it will be $12—and watch the film, no subscription necessary. So it’s a very grassroots, democratic way to watch the film. We do not have a big streamer behind us. …The streamers found it too controversial to broadcast. They don’t want to talk about Israel and Palestine in any iteration. There’s a great film called “No Other Land” that is winning prizes. It’s a beautiful film, but it doesn’t have distribution in [the U.S.]. Why not?
That’s surprising, given how topical your story is—and especially considering that your film is less about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than other recent films like “No Other Land” and “The Teacher” and more about the corruption scandal surrounding Netanyahu.
It’s a fairly simple, straightforward movie about one family’s corruption and it doesn’t wade into the more contentious terrain of what to do after he goes or the complicity of Israeli society more broadly or any of those issues. So my hope is that anybody who is against corruption, who will stand up and say corruption in our leaders is no good thing, would be able to watch this film.
The film ends on something of a cliffhanger because the story of the corruption scandal doesn’t have an end yet. Netanyahu has used the war as a pretext to postpone his trial, so it’s anyone’s guess when it’ll reach a conclusion. Do you have plans to revisit the story when it does?
We don’t have any plans to continue it in a formal way in a film. You need funding in place and a supporter and all of that, so there’s some practical considerations before you can commit to creating another film, a part two. But in a personal and professional capacity, I’m still following the story, absolutely.
Has the Netanyahu family reached out to you or your team directly?
We haven’t heard from the Netanyahus. We did request an interview. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t get it.
What impact are you hoping outside of Israel?
It would be very useful for the international community to understand that Netanyahu is not Israel and that criticizing Netanyahu is a perfectly valid thing to do. It’s not anti-Semitic and it’s not anti-Israeli to criticize him.
