Award-winning Israeli movie is contender for the Oscars

“I like to dream as big as possible because if you’re allowed to dream then…” says movie writer-director Moshe Rosenthal. One of his big dreams has come true as his film Tell Me Everything made Ophir (Israeli Oscars) Award history this year with  a record-breaking 16 nominations. It won ten awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay and will be the Israeli submission for the 2027 Academy Awards for Best International Feature.

“I’d hoped for success but it’s complicated; you grow in and out of love with a film,” he says. “When people ask me if I was surprised, I say of course. At the same time, since I was six, I’ve been planning to win awards, make amazing films and do endless beautiful projects that people will adore.”

Tell Me Everything is only Rosenthal’s second feature. His 2022 debut, the dramedy Karaoke (2022), starring Lior Ashkenazi, Sasson Gabai and Rita Shukrun explored marital relationships. By contrast, Tell Me Everything is short on laughs, but it is a sensitively-told coming-of-age memory story in which Rosenthal examines the complexities of the father-son relationship and what it means to be a man. It premieres in the UK at the Jewish Film Festival this month, with screenings in London and Manchester.

The film opens in 1987 when 12-year-old Boaz (Yair Mazor) sees his adored father, Meir (Assi Cohen) having gay sex in a pool shower cubicle, which inevitably has devastating consequences for Boaz and his family. Rosenthal’s distinctive portrayal of the 1980s, the era of big hair, shoulder pads and synth pop, unfolds during the early AIDS epidemic. Told from Boaz’s perspective, the story sees him become preoccupied with illness and aware of his own masculinity and his father’s sexuality. It later cuts to 1996, where an adult, outwardly homophobic Boaz (Ido Tako) seeks out Meir in an attempt for some form of resolution.

Rosenthal draws on aspects of his own life in his films. He grew up with two older sisters in Holon, with a mother who ran a beauty salon from their apartment. Unlike Meir, however, his father was a soldier. “The story isn’t autobiographical,” he says. “But the world, characters and emotions [sometimes unconsciously] are partly taken from my life.” This influenced how he approached the theme of masculinity.

“I grew up in a macho world and I struggled with it; asking myself what it means to be a man, especially when I came out as gay in my late 20s. I remember hoping for and needing my father’s guidance, being afraid of failing him by not becoming that type of man.” All these dilemmas are part of Boaz’s experience, albeit in an extreme way. “This existential question of what he is supposed to become. It’s a complex question, which Boaz and his father deal with.”

Paranoia and fear were widespread in 1980s Israel, Rosenthal recalls, speaking from San Francisco, where he is presenting the film at a festival. “I vividly remember there were no queer presentations, people who were struggling and suffering. There were only news interviews with sex workers. It was a dark and closeted time and I think it impacted a whole generation about sexuality. I grew up connecting sex and death and when I came out. I think that fear was embedded in me.”

The movie’s 1980s colour palette is a visual spectacle. To achieve this, he focused on memory as well as pictures from his childhood home, with pink and light blue emerging as the main colours. “But when we move to the 90s, there are dark undertones, [symbolising] what happened to that pink and that light blue. They turned into dark blue and red.”

Rosenthal has been surprised and moved by audience response to the film. He has received countless messages from people who tell him their story and has had individuals cry on his shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting it to touch such a nerve. Their experiences may not be the same, but they have a similar emotional thread.” At the first screening at the Sundance Film Festival in the US (where it had its world premiere), he saw a woman sobbing “in a way that felt like she needed help. That was when I first realised something is going on. I then started to see this reaction repeatedly. It’s difficult as I want to be there for people when they share, but I also need to take care of myself.”

A graduate of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Rosenthal wanted to be a filmmaker after seeing Jurassic Park as a child. “A lot of who I am as a filmmaker is an outcome of that combination of growing up in small town Israel and thinking about the Hollywood dream.”

At a time when there are continuing and increasing calls to boycott Israeli art and artists, Rosenthal, inevitably, has been affected. In October, Tell Me Everything was disinvited to Everyone’s Perfect, a queer film festival in Geneva. “At least they were brave enough in the beginning to take the film,” he says. “We don’t talk about all the festivals who are not touching it. I’m tired of seeing how everything is being politicised and it’s important for me not to allow it to happen to the film. I have political views as a private person but I’m an artist. And I want conversations with people who appreciate art and films, instead of conversations about war.”                                                                                                                                     

The UK premiere of Tell Me Everything is at the Curzon Mayfair, London on 8 November, followed by a Q&A with Moshe Rosenthal and at Cineworld Manchester: Didsbury on 24 November. Tickets at ukjewishfilm.org