NEW YORK (AP) — Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney, who in a decades-long career has tackled many a thorny issue, wasn’t planning a film about Israel — until one day last year, when a stunning leak fell into his hands.
The leak turned out to be more like a deluge.
Suddenly, Gibney, through a source who contacted him on the Signal messaging app, was being offered access to copious video recordings of police interviews with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, his son Yair, and a host of associates and benefactors, all conducted as part of the sprawling corruption case against Netanyahu. It amounted to an astonishing 1,000-plus hours of tapes.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker didn’t speak Hebrew, but sensed this was something big. He turned to longtime Israeli investigative reporter Raviv Drucker, who did a deep dive into the material, Gibney says, and showed him that “we had something that was very explosive.” Then Gibney enlisted colleague Alexis Bloom, who had worked in Israel, to direct.
The result: “The Bibi Files,” a hard-hitting documentary that certainly has timing on its side — this week, as it was released on streaming, Netanyahu took the stand in the long-running case.
If the timing is fortuitous, the film faced other obstacles. For one thing, Gibney and Bloom had to raise funds without disclosing to potential backers what they had, given the secrecy involved. Many potential backers and distributors were also nervous about getting involved, especially once war broke out after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Then there was the biggest obstacle of all: The film cannot legally be shown in Israel, due to privacy laws regulating such proceedings.
That doesn’t mean Israelis aren’t seeing it, though. Many have managed to watch the film either by using a VPN to bypass streaming restrictions, or by watching leaked versions that made their way to social media. “The film is being pirated like wildfire in Israel,” says Bloom.
And it has made a predictable splash, just as Netanyahu becomes the first sitting Israeli leader to take the stand as a criminal defendant. On Tuesday, he promised defiantly to knock down the “absurd” corruption allegations against him.
The longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases. He is accused of accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of cigars and champagne from a billionaire Hollywood producer in exchange for assistance with personal and business interests, and of promoting advantageous regulations for media moguls in exchange for favorable coverage.
In the leaked police videos, the 75-year-old leader sits at his desk in a surprisingly cramped office, a map of the region behind him. He expresses outrage at the proceedings, calls witnesses liars, and notes he has much weightier matters to attend to. At one point, asked about numbers of champagne bottles, he says he spends his time counting missiles threatening Israel, not bottles. Frequently, his answer is he doesn’t remember.