By David D’Arcy

The Bibi Files is a documentary that should be seen before its revelations, caught on tape, are overtaken by a larger war; the Palestinian no-budget drama To a Land Unknown presents a credible picture of refugee life.

Bibi Netanyahu in a scene from The Bibi Files. Photo: TIFF

A ticket that sold out quickly at TIFF had an unlikely star, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Bibi Files, unfinished and announced late, was billed as a work in progress, but it’s mostly done, say the filmmakers.

Directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney, the doc presents excerpts from interrogations that were part of  investigations before Netanyahu’s indictment on corruption charges in November 2019 – long before October 7, 2023. The testimony doesn’t do much for the brash Netanyahu’s reputation, besides confirming what anyone in Israel would have known already – that Israel’s Prime Minister did special favors for wealthy friends, and wants to remain in office and avoid ceding power.

Israeli law blocks the film from being screened in Israel, because the filmmakers lack the necessary legal permissions to show it there. Netanyahu has tried to keep it from ever screening anywhere. One might wonder why the leader of a democracy would want to prevent information about his activities from reaching the public.

The tapes were leaked to Gibney and Bloom, who are looking for a distributor. The Bibi Files screens next on October 15 at the Woodstock Film Festival, a short drive from western Mass.

This is not a film that you watch for its style. It has all the charm of a surveillance video. That is not underestimate that medium; it achieves what a surveillance video does — crude unvarnished exposure. The tapes show a blustery and impatient Netanyahu avoiding questions, claiming not to remember things and becoming angry when his questioners find those answers insufficient. The interrogators get under Netanyahu’s skin, and under that of his wife and son. You will be grateful that the office of Israeli Prime Minister is not hereditary – not yet.

Sometimes the issues are petty. Netanyahu likes Cuban cigars and got them from friends seeking favors. It turns out that he tried to conceal that. He also helped friends get US visas and other special treatment. We are told in the film that his wife Sarah likes receiving gifts of champagne; even has special coded names for the treats. She also loses her temper when asked touchy questions. Netanyahu’s son Yair, who spent much of the Gaza War in Miami (who’s paying his rent there?), seems to have inherited his mother’s short fuse.

The croneyism on display looks like politics as usual. Netanyahu’s critics stress that it’s illegal – to paraphrase Mel Brooks, incredibly illegal. A still photo of Netanyahu smoking a cigar makes him look like a mobster. How does Don Bibi sound?

But it’s more than politics as usual. Netanyahu remains in power now thanks in part to alliances with far right parties that are linked to violence against Arabs. For decades the established right in Israel wouldn’t touch those extremists. Now they’re in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

Like it or not, Bibi is good at assuring his own survival, or good enough to stay in power. Most US politicians in such a position – forced to undergo videotaped interrogations about accepting gifts or other illegal activities (i.e., Robert Menendez, and now a growing number of New York City officials) — would have been less adept at supplying obfuscating details about serving cronies, intimidating staff and citing bad memory.

Maybe they just have less practice.

That said, Netanyahu is concerned enough about the film reaching any audience that he sued to stop the Toronto screenings. That gambit failed, yet the ban on showing it in Israel still stands.

As for the potential impact of The Bibi Files, the interrogations of Bibi, Sara, and Yair are a matter of record in Israel. And Netanyahu’s prosecutions are on hold while the war in Gaza (and elsewhere) continues. For now,with bombing across the Lebanese border, combat seems nowhere near an end. Protesters at the screening, hardly anti-Israel, called for negotiations to release the last surviving hostages held by Hamas.

Can a country whose tech-nerds weaponized thousands of pagers into explosive devices produce hackers that could put The Bibi Files online? It wouldn’t be the first film to be pirated in Israel. Let’s hope that Bloom and Gibney find a distributor quickly. For any audience, this is a film that should be seen before its revelations are overtaken by a larger war.

A scene from To a Land Unknown. Photo: TIFF

Also at TIFF were Palestinian films, among them No Other Land, by a team of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. The documentary, shot over several years, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where I reviewed it. It’s set on a small stretch of land in the occupied West Bank where Arab families build homes and a school, over and over again, because Israeli soldiers and settlers tear down whatever goes up. The film echoes the now-classic doc Five Broken Cameras (2011), which documented the relations between Palestinians and Israelis in a West Bank village, where Israeli soldiers destroyed cameras documenting the serial ransacking of that village. No Other Land deals with a similar history. It’s eerily prophetic, warning of the expansion of land seizures and destruction of homes today on the West Bank, where scrutiny from non-Arab media is minimal. A recurring motif in Arab coverage (and in the film) is the indifference of Israeli soldiers to pillaging by armed Israeli settlers. More of same occurring now.

In director Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, two Palestinian friends, Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are stuck and broke in Athens, scheming to raise money for a flight to Germany. They do what desperate people often do; they prey on those around them. The no-budget drama, which lists funding from eight different countries, is a credible picture of refugee life – scrambling for food, scamming for fake papers and travel money, hooking up with the odd local. Life for the pair in Athens is nowhere near as squalid as it is for most migrants trying to cross Europe. Still, it is grim enough for these two to betray other Palestinians. Solidarity and humanity are noble slogans for posters, but not a priority in this story.

You can’t call the bare-boned visual aesthetic of To a Land Unknown neo-neo-realism, but it has poignant moments of deprivation and betrayal. Named for a refugee camp in Lebanon where Israel’s allies massacred civilians in 1982, Chatila struggles to keep Reda’s drug addiction from consuming whatever cash they have. The two can’t even hold on to what they steal. In Fleifel’s timely film, Palestinians fortunate enough to get abroad are still treated like migrants.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.