TIFF: Anti-Netanyahu Film Premiere Goes Forward in Toronto After Court Motion Fails

After facing a failed attempt by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to block their world-premiere screening, the filmmakers behind the anti-Netanyahu documentary The Bibi Files carried on Monday night debuting their work at the Toronto International Film Festival with a mix of grim resolve and giddy triumph.

Alexis Bloom’s film, which builds its case against the long-serving Israeli prime minister on a foundation of never-before-seen interrogation tapes, at times played like a rally to the Israeli-skewing, often anti-Netanyahu crowd. 

“You need to find a way to take this film and airdrop it over Israel,” one Israeli attendee said from the audience after the screening, though judging by the growing crowds of protesters on Tel Aviv streets in the wake of six dead Israeli hostages, the message may have already been received.

The Bibi Files was produced by the Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, who said he and Bloom pushed to show the work at Toronto in light of the ongoing war and tragedies it has brought on all sides. 

“People are dying every day, and we wanted to make a statement with this film,” Gibney told the audience after the screening.

Bloom, who is still shaping and adding material to the doc, said that while her work has taken on added urgency in light of the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the ensuing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, she actually started making it during Israel’s judicial-reform protests that began in early 2023. “You can see this pattern going on worldwide, this democratic backsliding,” she said of the protests’ inciting event. Bloom has examined these themes before with her 2018 Roger Ailes film Divide and Conquer and Gibney’s Wikileaks film We Steal Secrets, which she produced.

The festival’s chief documentary programmer, Thom Powers, scheduled the Netanyahu movie just last week, believing it had something important to say about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

As the credits rolled and the audience stood to applaud, about a dozen people held up signs calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal. Outside on the city’s King Street before the screening, protesters led chants in Hebrew calling for new parliamentary elections, a ceasefire and a hostage deal.

The film does not yet have any distribution deals, which Gibney said he hoped the fest screenings would yield.

Bibi Files arose after a source had approached Gibney with the secret interrogation tapes last year. The recordings had never been seen in Israel (though some of their contents had been leaked to text-based journalists) and likely never will, at least officially, given a privacy law that would put the source in legal jeopardy.

While the privacy law ostensibly only applies to Israel, Netanyahu’s lawyers requested the judge in his corruption trial block the Toronto screening, arguing that the movie was still bound by the statute internationally. The judge, Oded Shaham, rejected the motion to immediately block the film, allowing Monday’s screening and a second one Tuesday to move forward, though did seek a response from principals by Wednesday.

The Bibi Files uses a mix of talking-head history and in-the-room vérité to paint its picture of a leader who has arrogated power for corrupt and self-interested reasons  —  the allegations are of some $250,000 in gifts received in exchange for political favors  —  to his country’s detriment. While delving some into Netanyahu’s policies on the war in Gaza, it focuses most heavily on his corruption trial, whose indictments on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust were handed down nearly five years ago as the trial continues.

The contours of Netanyahu’s corruption charges, the influence of his wife Sara and his coalition with far-right politicians will be well-known to those who follow Israeli politics. But the sight of the most powerful man in the country’s modern history on the back foot with police investigators in his office  —  where he is occasionally playful, sometimes indignant and often defiant  — could etch an especially negative portrait.

The movie also features candid looks at a who’s-who of modern Israeli figures, as everyone from Hollywood producer and longtime Netanyahu ally Arnon Milchan to current Israeli-government opposition leader Yair Lapid (once Finance Minister under Netanyahu) can be seen talking about what they knew of alleged corruption in unusually candid interrogation-room settings. Unwitting co-starring roles by Sara Netanyahu (angrier and more outspoken than her husband) and son Yair (a right-wing influencer who calls the police investigators “the Stasi”) round out the picture.

Israeli investigative journalist and well-known Netanyahu antagonist Raviv Drucker is the main talking head and de facto narrator of the film (and a producer). The movie also benefits from a 19-year-old Israeli woman from Kibbutz Be’eri who gives a pungently anti-Netanyahu view from the ground.

One audience member Monday did call out that Netanyahu has not been found guilty and cautioned against rushing to judgment without a conviction.

While The Bibi Files in its current form doesn’t get to the protests of the last week — it stops with Netanyahu’s address to Congress this summer — its distribution could nonetheless feed into the growing call from a large majority of Israelis who want a ceasefire and hostage deal from Netanyahu as well as a change in government. A poll from Israel’s Channel 12 last week found that more than two-thirds of Israelis believed Netanyahu should not run when the next election is held.

As with all documentaries, though, the question is whether the film will build on that momentum or simply reinforce previously held views. 

Gibney, at least, believes it could bring new clarity for international audiences.

“For a lot of Americans, the war goes on and on and on. And a lot of people are wondering ‘why does it continue?’” he told the TIFF audience. “And I think one of the reasons for taking this film on is to explain a lot of the events that we now see through the corruption, the moral corruption, of this one individual.”