Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney tackles political power in new documentary about Netanyahu

The story behind every great documentary is an unusual one. The story behind Alex Gibney’s documentary The Bibi Files is no exception: it all began with a Signal message and concluded with one of the most impactful political documentaries in recent history. Alex Gibney was approached through an intermediary via the Signal messaging app and was offered access to an abundance of video recordings of police interrogations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s wife Sara, Netanyahu’s son Yair, and many other associates and donors to Netanyahu – all in relation to the ongoing corruption trial against Netanyahu.

This was an astonishing offer: over 1,000 hours worth of tapes. Gibney, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, didn’t speak Hebrew but knew this was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. Gibney’s instinct was right, and he enlisted the services of veteran Israeli investigative journalist Raviv Drucker, who viewed the footage and confirmed that they had something big. The film was subsequently directed by Alexis Bloom, a colleague of Gibney’s who had previously worked in Israel and whose knowledge of the culture was essential to the film. Gibney is known for producing insightful and often scathing documentaries, such as Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief. His reputation for taking on the powerful and the elite in Going Clear, the Catholic Church in Mea Maxima Culpa, and the US military in Taxi to the Dark Side made him the obvious choice for a film that targeted the sitting Prime Minister of Israel.

The process of creating the film was far from easy, and Gibney talked candidly about the challenges they faced in creating the film in secret and the difficulties they encountered from mainstream American media outlets. Those media outlets that might have previously fought to get their hands on the film were now unwilling to touch it, fearing the political fallout and the pressure that might come from the powerful forces that the film targeted. The tapes, made between 2016 and 2018, reveal Netanyahu and those around him in candid and unscripted moments, often angry, defensive, and even contemptuous of the investigators questioning them. In the tapes, Netanyahu is seen defending himself against the investigators, calling them “delusional” and describing the whole process as “preposterous and insane.” His wife Sara is equally aggressive in the tapes, and Netanyahu’s son Yair describes the Israeli police as the “Stasi secret police.” The film had its work-in-progress screening at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where it drew about 200 people.

Towards the end of the screening, Gibney made an announcement to the audience that Netanyahu had made a motion to stop the screening, but it had been denied by the court. TS2 After struggling to find mainstream distributors who would back it, the film found its home on the streaming service Jolt, followed by its release on the Tucker Carlson Network in March 2026, an apt time to find itself at the heart of an already precarious world debate.