As Israel continues to lay siege to Gaza, its president, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been dodging justice. If there is no last minute twist, this December 10 he will testify in the trial in which he is accused of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Netanyahu’s testimony should have occurred in November 2023, but a month before the Hamas attacks of October 7 occurred and the Israeli leader began his crusade against the Palestinian people. The war has delayed its declaration for more than a year, which now seems imminent.
Netanyahu is accused of receiving gifts and bribes in exchange for favors, something he attributes to attacks and fake news from left-wing media, but which is based on numerous testimonies. Many of them make up the corpus of images that shape Netanyahu Filethe documentary that has obtained the videos of the statements of all those who gave gifts to Bibi, as they call the president. A leak that puts the politician on the ropes, who tried to stop the film, which arrives on Filmin this Friday, from being screened at the last Toronto Festival, where it had its premiere.
The documentary is not just a mere exhibition of testimonies, but links everything to the war conflict and offers context to understand how everything is linked. The thesis of the film is clear, Netanyahu’s pacts with the extreme right in the last elections, his addiction to power and the need to evade justice have caused a war that serves as fireworks so that the Israeli people do not think about corruption of their president, against which before the war they demonstrated in the streets.

The film’s director, Alexis Bloom, is clear that this union with the extreme right was key to Israel’s present. “For 25 years he has been defending and praising the Supreme Court, there are famous speeches of his where he does so, but suddenly, one day, his government came out to say that it had to be changed completely. There it became very clear that his own personal legal problems were affecting and changing the way he led Israel. And when October 7 happened, none of us knew what was going to happen, but we were kind of waiting for him to fight a war and see how he would try to keep his coalition together during these times,” Bloom says.
When asked if this movement has diverted attention from his corruption to the bombings, he does not hesitate: “That’s exactly it. The gaze of the entire country went elsewhere. They have become a kind of traumatized nation fighting a war. So his corruption investigation moved much lower on the agenda of concerns. But now he’s back, and he’s supposed to start his trial now.”
Netanyahu’s attempted veto of the documentary in Toronto was taken with humor, because they knew that “he has no legal jurisdiction there.” “He tried to go to an Israeli court to try to block a movie in Toronto. I don’t know how he thought that could be successful, because they have no jurisdiction over Canada. I think it was just an exhibition. A very grandiose declaration of intentions,” he says.
The entire country’s gaze went elsewhere, to the war, and the corruption investigation moved to a much lower place on its agenda of concerns.
Alexis Bloom
— Filmmaker
The distribution of Netanyahu File In the US it has not been easy, “probably because of the country’s close relationship with Israel,” says Alex Gibney, producer of the film and renowned documentary filmmaker. The film has been released directly on a small and unknown platform for many Jolt.film. Alexis Bloom does not name names, but she does confess that they got together to talk about the project with a platform. They met for lunch and when he told them that it was about Netanyahu, the response was blunt: “They looked at me and said, ‘don’t send it to us.’”
They knew that the issue was thorny, especially in their country, but they tried not to think about it and focus only on making the documentary. “I think it’s my job as a filmmaker to make the movie. It was quite difficult to do it. In a language that is not my own, in a country that is at war… when I went there, sometimes I flew and the flights were canceled. I knew it would be controversial and that it wouldn’t be easy to sell, but Alex Gibney and I acted like we didn’t give a shit about any of that and focused on finding a way to get it made and see the light of day. Furthermore, we couldn’t tell anyone that we had that material either. I hope people see it, because if you think about it, it’s not even controversial, it’s pretty simple, it’s a very serious criminal investigation that is affecting their political decisions. “I don’t think even his supporters can deny it,” he says.

The documentary also highlights how many international press have not paid attention to the corruption accusations, while news about the war has interested them. For Alexis Bloom it is not a question of Netanyahu’s “impunity”, but rather that media attention is limited and focuses on the war “and gets lost in internal problems.” “It’s as if all countries are only aware of their internal problems and there is limited bandwidth unless you are an expert in foreign policy,” he justifies. It is surprising to see the arrogance of Netanyahu, his wife Sara or their son during interrogations, where the latter goes so far as to scold the police and compare them to the Stasi and the Gestapo. As if they knew that nothing could touch them.
The filmmaker closed the documentary with the trial to be held and the war that had just begun, but she had to end it at some point. He says that it was necessary to take “a step back” and realize that the press was doing its job, but his was different. The only thing that would have changed “if he had resigned or if he had been kicked out of power,” and they knew that was highly unlikely: “All my Israeli colleagues told me, ‘don’t worry, he will never leave power.’ That’s not going to happen.’ I would have been delighted for it to happen. “It wouldn’t have been good for my movie, but I would have sacrificed it for a good ending like that.”
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