2024-12-02
27 分钟We cover the release of two fascinating and revealing documentaries. Both take a sideways look at men we’re familiar with from their public – and vastly different – profiles: one as a world leader and the other as an icon of Hollywood’s golden age. ‘The Bibi Files’, directed by Alexis Bloom, uses leaked interrogation footage of Benjamin Netanyahu to explore contemporary Israeli politics. Then, ‘Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes’, directed by Kathryn Ferguson, takes a behind-the-scenes look at actor Humphrey Bogart. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to Monocle on Culture.
I'm Robert Bound.
On today's show, we're covering the release of two fascinating and revealing new documentaries.
Both take a sideways look at men.
We'Re familiar with from their hugely public.
And vastly different profiles.
One as a world leader and the other as an icon of Hollywood's golden age.
This duo of documentaries are real exemplars of the craft, creatively lifting the lids on people and worlds we think we might know and taking the audience on riveting journeys of discovery.
We'll be getting under the skin of both films.
Oh, so very different up ahead in this episode, so do stay tuned.
First up, the Bibi Files takes as its extraordinary source material footage of police interrogations of the highest echelons of Israeli government and society, with a special focus on Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the footage, Netanyahu repeatedly denies allegations of bribery and corruption, while police interviews with witnesses, including Israeli billionaires and their employees, describe the steady stream of gifts flowing to the Prime Minister and his wife Sarah, who is herself an explosive character.
In this, the footage is supplemented by a cast of fascinating talking heads, a childhood friend of Netanyahu, a journalist, the former head of the Israeli Security Agency, Shin Bet and others.
Altogether, director Alexis Bloom paints a portrait of one man's fight for political supremacy and survival and its devastating consequences for Israel's democracy and the war that's killed and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians in just the last year.
I spoke to Alexis about her film the BB Files and began by asking when she first knew the scale and intrigue of the source materials.
Well, Alex Gibney approached me last summer, so it was probably July 2023, and said that he'd been leaked these tapes.
He was approached on signal by somebody who said, I have some material, do you want to see it?
And Alex, being a long term investigative journalist, gets a lot of messages and some are legitimate and some are not legitimate.
But to his credit, he always sort of tugs on the thread.
So he tugged on the thread and found it that to be true, that somebody had very interesting material and they were the leaked tapes and he brought them to me and he said, are you interested in doing this?