Live Update arrow right icon From the Liveblog of Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Hotly anticipated ‘Bibi Files’ debuts in Toronto after Netanyahu fails to block screening

10 September 2024, 2:57 am 8 Edit

The Toronto International Film Festival is beginning its highly anticipated debut screening of “The Bibi Files,” an unfinished film featuring never-before-seen footage of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being questioned by police between 2016 and 2018.

The screening comes after the Jerusalem District Court rejected a request by the premier to block the screening of the film earlier in the day. Netanyahu had argued that journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the film’s producers, was set to publish footage from a police interrogation without permission from the court — a crime that carries up to a year in prison in Israel.

Outside the theater earlier, about a dozen pro-Israel protesters demonstrated against Netanyahu and for a deal to free hostages held in Gaza.

According to reports in Hebrew media, a Telegram group in Israel that had promised to leak the film was joined by thousands of Israelis, including a number of senior politicians from within Netanyahu’s government, but a manager of the group says now the footage is not being published due to legal issues.

Among those in the crowd are a number of Israeli journalists.

According to Variety magazine, the recordings of the corruption investigation were leaked to renowned director Alex Gibney last year and feature interviews with Netanyahu, his wife Sara and his son Yair, along with friends, associates and household staff.

Netanyahu was ultimately charged with fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases filed in 2019, and with bribery in one of them. The proceedings are ongoing and likely to take years to wrap up, especially given delays after the first trial was suspended along with all other non-urgent cases due to Hamas’s shock October 7 incursion and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing in the cases against him and claims that the charges were fabricated in a witch hunt led by the police and state prosecution, and facilitated by a weak attorney general.

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