‘The Bibi Files’ is an anti-Netanyahu documentary that looks very familiar
From producer Alex Gibney and director Alexis Bloom comes a look at the corruption and demagoguery of Israel’s longtime leader.
The Bibi Files, produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom, is an expansive documentary about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has led the country, with a couple of short breaks, since around the time Barack Obama became president of the United States.
He’s also been on trial for corruption for an uncommonly long time — and is finally testifying this very week — and the film covers that extensively, including the use of extensive interrogation footage of the prime minister and others.
While it spends some time going through his history, the film spends most of its running time making something resembling a prosecutorial brief against the prime minister.
The film makes the following cases against Netanyahu, and makes all of them very convincingly: That he’s probably guilty of the corruption charges, that his family members aren’t much better, that he has been a divisive and destructive leader of Israel who’s been around for way too long, and that’s done terrible things for the nation’s credibility by bringing thuggish Kahanists — Israel’s equivalent of the Klan — into his government.
And while October 7 and the current war enters the picture relatively late in the narrative, the film doesn’t have a high opinion of his conduct in that regard, either- while also arguing that his actions during the war are at least partially about preserving his power.
At some point, I realized why The Bibi Files looked so familiar: It’s an anti-Netanyahu documentary that feels remarkably like an anti-Trump documentary, following all of the beats and cadences of the numerous docs that have arrived over the last decade. Some of them — notably 2020’s Totally Under Control — were made by Alex Gibney himself.
Just like in all the anti-Trump films, we hear from experts, many of whom are journalists, academics, and, in some cases, “whistleblowers. " In this case, the latter come from among the numerous figures in Israeli politics who have fallen out with Bibi, including the family’s former housekeeper.
There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, and I was convinced by the case the film was prosecuting. But then again, I don’t need convincing. And as recent events have taught us, the real-world effectiveness of “documentary arguing that a specific political figure is bad” seems to have its limits.
That sad, tthere is a lot of stuff here that’s entertaining and colorful. I’m not exactly sure if Israel has anything resembling our Fifth Amendment, but we see Bibi sparring with interrogators, on camera, seemingly without an attorney present. We see the late Bibi benefactor Sheldon Adelson, stating that he might have to break off his friendship with the Netanyahus. His wife, Sara, is accused of various diva behavior, while he’s even got a Don Jr. of his own, Yair Netanyahu.
The target audience for a film like this is American liberal Zionists, the sort of people who believe that Israel is inherently good but that Netanyahu’s reign is a betrayal of what the Zionist project is all about— a viewpoint that, considering how many elections Bibi has won, has begun to take a hit. Conservatives are not going to see this film, nor are leftists who think Israel is committing genocide. Therefore, the film risks suffering from the same dynamics that Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign did.
Bloom is a very talented documentarian, who has made films about Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, Roger Ailes, and rock muse Anita Pallenberg, earlier this year. She shows a fine aptitude for this type of film, and it was a big coup to get ahold of that interrogation footage.
Will it matter? That’s another question entirely.
The Bibi Files opens in New York on the 11th, and will also be available on Jolt, an online distribution platform for independent documentaries (it’s available on Roku.)