(L-R) Neta Orbach, Mor Dimri, Moshe Rosenthal, Yair Mazor, Ido Tako, Keren Tzur and Assi Cohen attend the “Tell Me Everything” Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

By Adam Silverstein

Tell Me Everything is a quiet gut punch of a film, one that settles into the room and stays there. Premiering in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at The Ray Theatre, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s deeply personal feature plays like a memory you can’t quite shake — intimate, aching, and powered more by longing than plot.

Rosenthal opens the night by acknowledging just how close this one cuts. “I always say my films are personal,” he tells the audience, “but this time it might be too personal.” He describes the film as being about family and how hard it is to actually talk to one another — a deceptively straightforward framing that proves quietly devastating over the next two hours.

Set in Israel initially in 1987, Tell Me Everything centers on Boaz, a 12-year-old boy played with remarkable sensitivity by Yair Mazor. Boaz idolizes his father, sees him as solid and heroic. Then he discovers the secret that fractures everything: his father is gay. The revelation lands not as a moment of clarity but as a slow unraveling, shaped by fear, shame, and the ever-present anxiety of the HIV epidemic looming in the background.

Rosenthal doesn’t rush this realization. Instead, the film sits with Boaz’s confusion and terror — his fear that AIDS might spread to his family and his anger at his father for disrupting his sense of stability. In one brutal moment, Boaz cuts his father out of family photographs, a small gesture that feels enormous. The audience at The Ray is completely still.

What makes the film hit so hard is its perspective. This is not a coming-out story in any conventional sense. It’s a story about the collateral damage of secrecy — the mother left reeling, the child left grasping for answers, the father left trapped in desire. Keren Tzur plays Boaz’s mother with restrained heartbreak. Assi Cohen’s father is not villainized but aches for connection in a world that offers none.

The film moves forward in time, flashing from 1987 to 1996, where an older Boaz, now 21 and played by Ido Tako, is still orbiting the absence his father left behind. The shift deepens the ache rather than resolving it. This is a film about wanting — wanting answers, forgiveness, closeness.

Tight shots dominate, pulling the viewer uncomfortably toward faces and emotions. The music pulses throughout — new wave, punk, disco — acting as an emotional bridge between father and son. As Rosenthal explains during the Q&A, the soundtrack becomes a language of connection when words fail. “I tried to tell the story through music,” he says. “It’s the connection between the father and son.”

Rosenthal speaks openly about the autobiographical roots of the film. “It’s the world I grew up in,” he says. “My father was there but in many ways was not there. I longed for him.” He clarifies that while the events of the film aren’t literal, the emotional truth clearly is.

When Tako speaks about collaborating with Rosenthal — “I was sucked into the script. Every page” — it feels earned. The cast and crew, having flown in from Israel, receive warm applause, but the loudest response is reserved for the film itself, which lands with a heavy exhale.

Tell Me Everything is an honest portrait of a boy who just wants his father, and the realization that love doesn’t always arrive in the shape you need.