Queerness is identifiable by its silence. Living within a panoptic, self-disciplinary atmosphere, in many cases it’s a matter of staying voiceless or being forced into silence. In the 1980s world of writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything (2026, עצמאות), which just world-premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival (22 January–1 February), nothing could be more true. While this marks Rosenthal’s sophomore feature after Karaoke (2022, קריוקי), which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, the filmmaker is also known for creating a number of short films centred on encounters and relationships between men. However, in a twist on the so-called queer film, it is not the filmmaker’s protagonist dealing with this Foucauldian plight—but instead his father, while the film’s main character is heterosexual. Regardless, what connects them together is a pervasive social fear of queerness, in both straight and queer individuals, that Rosenthal confronts with dignity and a call to disrupt.
With his naive eyes and cutesy gap-toothed smile, 12-year-old Boaz (played at this young age by Yair Mazor) seemingly wants for nothing. Boaz’s older sisters Idit and Meital (Mor Dimri and Neta Orbach) adore him, his mother Bella (Keren Tzur) treats him like a prince, and his father Meir (Assi Cohen) treats him like a best friend. However, this cheery façade betrays the burden Boaz holds inside as the youngest child and the only boy in a middle-class household in the 1980s; costume and makeup design (by Hava Levy Rozalsky and Maya Levy Shamay, respectively) do much of the heavy lifting to transport us back to this era.
This burden revealed to us through close-wrought camerawork that urges us to empathise with his anxiety rather than with the patriarchal environment in which he is being raised and how he is expected to behave as he grows. Winding and wholly inventive camerawork by cinematographer Ziv Berkovich shoots the younger Boaz from uncomfortable angles—moving in slowly on his face, as if to probe where he looks, and looking down on him from uncomfortable angles.
As Boaz performs a joyous choreographed dance routine and lip-sync with his sister at his own birthday party, his mother looks on warily: what does this indicate about her darling child? (On the other hand, Meir happily goads him on, thinking nothing of it.) Boaz is his mother’s boy in a social environment still largely leaning on the presence of a man to dictate the status of their family—however much Bella resists this, proudly. An early-film instance of police repossessing some of the family’s belongings—due to one of his father’s failed business ventures—provides vital context around the need to save face, a trait that is then adopted by the children as a way to cope. It’s later clear that Boaz has long internalised this in how he sees the world: lying is more socially acceptable than shame.
One fateful summer afternoon, Boaz witnesses the edges of a sexual encounter between his father and a man in a public pool bathroom. All he needs to witness is his precious papa kneeling and the recipient’s hand tightening in pleasure as he grips the stall wall to let his imagination run wild. But it is not necessarily fear of the act itself or that it was performed between two men—it is, rather, the fear of the unknown being furiously cultivated. When the boy begins to read articles about the HIV-AIDS crisis and sees fearmongering news spots on TV, they immediately throw him into a spiral of dread that his beloved family will soon die because of his father’s actions. Fear and shame thus remain two sides of the same dangerous yet violent Janus-faced coin.
The three siblings follow him to a forested cruising spot in Tel Aviv to confirm their suspicions before reporting the trespass to their mother. Rosenthal juxtaposes the harsh, flat lighting of day with its oversaturated hues—where there is nowhere to hide—with the careful, dark cover of wooded night: one shrouded in the unknown, but also one that provides full protection from everything that threatens to be exposed, and thereby scrutinised, during daytime hours. Screaming matches between Bella and Meir air out the family’s dirty laundry downstairs, beneath games of Scattergories between the siblings meant to keep them all sane. Once Meir is forced from the home forever, a ritual purging of the house begins: the girls slice his photos from albums, take out his clothes while wearing plastic gloves, and change all the décor to leave no reminder of the past. This is except, of course, what Meir takes with him, including a green-bottled cologne with a scent adored by Bella and what Meir playfully puts onto Boaz as a kid.
Nine years later and sometime in the 1990s, a now-grown Boaz (Ido Tako) works at a petrol station and aspires to study psychology in university. In the latter half of the film, Rosenthal paints the film in near-chiaroscuro, reminiscent of a psychological thriller or crime drama. This world is imbued with jazzier orchestral music, ethereal and pensive but also experimental and brutal at times—reflecting Boaz’s more mature state, tainted by hatred fostered in him when he was younger. Throughout the film, composer Gael Rakotondrabe is not afraid to use the score like a laser pointer, incorporating flashes of sound to punctuate the story—from moments of infectious joy to Boaz’s most terrifying thoughts crossing his mind.
This part of the film reflects our protagonist’s advanced state of despair: fear has done its dirty work in the form of creating hatred inside him, yet the guilt he feels for spurring his father’s departure eats him alive. We witness Boaz at his most vicious, where it’s clear that hatred bubbles inside him; in one instance, he spits on a visibly queer individual, to the horror of his friends and girlfriend. His dissatisfaction over his current state fuels dueling desires. He must work to assist his mother financially and, by doing so, maintain his status as the man of the house; at the same time, he yearns to know what happened to his father, who never personally did him wrong.
Beyond his poignant grasp of growing pains, Rosenthal’s powerful pseudo-diptych offers an opportunity to reach across that invisible line to say: we understand how fear has been forced onto you. Queerness may be identifiable by its silence, but that goes for both Boaz and Meir. In a classified ad that Boaz finds in a newspaper, his father, now in his 50s, calls for a “discreet man”, reflecting his need to stay hidden in order to stay safe. But the young man, too, has been encouraged for years to behave in a way that serves the patriarchal framework. In doing so, he has lost all of his time with his father—maybe the one man who really sought to see him for who he is.
When fear sinks its claws deep into the mind, hateful thinking becomes difficult to unlearn. But the film’s title, Tell Me Everything, becomes an emotional call to action for Boaz, Meir, and the audience. Rosenthal insists that it’s not too late to break the stigma: words and stories spoken out loud can act as a powerful antidote to fear, no matter how ingrained. His inventive approach lingers long after the film’s deeply moving final conversation between Boaz and Meir: a moment of guttural honesty. Between his stylish, stylised approach to depicting the internal contradictions of the ‘80s/‘90s and the rawness of storytelling behind his characters’ journeys of fear, shame, and forgiveness, Rosenthal has created an unforgettable, essential work.
*****
Tell Me Everything is screening in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance Film Festival (22 January-1 February).
tags:1980schildhoodcruisingfeaturedgay
