Netanyahu's request to ban 'The Bibi Files' screening at TIFF rejected
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According to the TIFF website, the documentary has "key information regarding the investigation" of the Israeli prime minister, including "never-before-seen leaked footage."
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives for a press conference in the Government Press Office in occupied al-Quds on September 4, 2024. (AP)
Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered that "The Bibi Files", a documentary including "never-before-seen leaked evidence" of corruption interrogations, be prohibited from TIFF.
The judges in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's criminal case denied his plea for a restriction on the release of the film, which is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) late on Monday.
According to the TIFF website, the documentary has "key information regarding the investigation" of the Prime Minister, including "never-before-seen leaked footage."
The film was directed by Alexis Bloom, with production credits going to Bloom, Alex Gibney, and Raviv Drucker, an Israeli Channel 13 reporter.
Amit Hadad, Netanyahu's lawyer, contended that the publishing of the interrogations was illegal under Israeli law and that the fact that they were being broadcast overseas did not change Drucker's legal responsibility not to publish them, or at the very least to obtain the court's approval to do so.
Judge Oded Shaham refused the request for an urgent order prohibiting publication and asked the entity and Drucker to respond by Wednesday.
The recordings feature a never-seen-before police interrogation of Netanyahu conducted between 2016 and 2018 as part of an evidence collection determining if an indictment should be made on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. He was later charged in three cases in 2019.
“These recordings shed light on Netanyahu’s character in a way that is unprecedented and extraordinary,” Gibney, who received the linked recordings in 2023, told Variety. “They are powerful evidence of his venal and corrupt character and how that led us to where we are at right now.”
The recordings are composed of thousands of hours of extensive interviews with the occupation leader, his wife Sara, his son Yair, as well as his friends, associates, and household employees. However, the footage was never seen since they were protected under Israeli privacy law.
“The Bibi Files” has been described by TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers as “a work of first-rate documentary journalism. Alexis Bloom and Alex Gibney obtained revelatory footage that no one has seen before, then conducted in-depth interviews with a wide array of figures including from the top ranks of the Israeli government."
Netanyahu's character revealed
“Netanyahu’s character comes through very strongly in the recordings,” Bloom, a producer, said, adding, “I would say the difference between this film and a news item or something that you might see on PBS about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that this is a very human look at the people in the news headlines.”
The director highlighted that the film attempts to relate the interrogations and corruption trial to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The film is set in between the Prime Minister's past and the present, revealing "something Shakespearean about the man in the sense that his slow corruption of character and his desperate need to stay in power led him to do terrible things that we’re now seeing evidence of," according to Gibney.
Bloom stated that the 2023 Israeli judicial reform was the reason she took on the film.
“[Netanyahu’s government] tries to overhaul the Supreme Courts and then waged the war in a way that would have never happened if he did not have such an extreme coalition,” she said.
“Netanyahu overstaying his welcome is something that many Israelis would agree on and many Palestinians would agree on too. They might diverge when you go further than that in terms of what’s the solution to the Middle East crisis. They will certainly diverge on that, but actually I think that most people, except for the hardcore Bibist, would agree that Netanyahu has to go," Bloom added.
“There is a certain urgency in terms of reckoning with this material and reckoning with Netanyahu’s character at a time when we are being told, 'Oh, these discussions are for another day because Netanyahu’s in the middle of a war,'” Gibney said, asserting the importance of revealing Netanyahu's story amid his regime's aggression against Palestinians.
