Sundance ‘26: ‘TELL ME EVERYTHING’ Severs Familial Ties Amid the AIDS Crisis

Tell Me Everything unfolds like a memory. Or a bad dream that has grown nostalgic with time. From its oversaturated aesthetic to the buoyant Israeli disco influences and gaudy ’80s production design, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Hebrew-language film is soaked in the specificity of time and place. It hopscotches through timelines in Tel Aviv to tell the coming-of-age story of 12-year-old Greek-Israeli Boaz (Yair Mazor), just before his bar mitzvah, and the young man he’ll grow to become.

The film unfolds against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic where an impressionable Boaz becomes increasingly terrified after discovering that his beloved father (Assi Cohen) has been engaging in “extracurricular activities” with other men at the gym. He shares the news with his two older sisters, who take it upon themselves to follow their dad to his cruising spots. They catch him in the act. Later, they quite literally cut him out of their lives (and every single one of their family photos), and the effect is both immediate and devastating.

Rosenthal’s second feature film is alive with song and dance, accented by a synth-heavy, upbeat score by Gael Rakotondrabe that infuses the musicality of the scenes with vitality. Once the family fractures, the joy begins to fade. What once felt like a musical slowly transforms into something closer to a quiet tragedy, aesthetics included.

The film explores the emotional fallout of Boaz growing up fatherless in the wake of that rupture. Raised instead by his overly affectionate mother, Boaz begins to feel the absence of his father as a constant ache. His rejection becomes a specter that follows him into adolescence and adulthood. Can he forgive his father? More importantly, can he forgive himself for driving him away?

This is a delicate film with a strong point of view, where what is left unsaid carries the most weight. The guilt lingers over both of them, unspoken but ever-present. At its core, it is a father-son story about identity, shame, and the painful process of learning how to live freely and Rosenthal doesn’t shy away from that driving the narrative.

As Boaz matures and plans to head to college, the film slows down and loses some of its visual flair. Even so, its emotional core stays intact. Boaz carries not only the absence of a father but also the unbearable weight of believing that absence is his own fault. When they finally do meet again, the time lost is heavy; their unspoken silence underscoring the gulf that’s grown between them. Only when they are able to see each other for who they are and tell each other everything, what once felt irreparably broken begins to take new shape. There is hope, not to reclaim the past, but to begin again, this time under the light of truth.

CONCLUSION: A father-son drama that aches with unspoken tenderness, ‘Tell Me Everything’ finds what it means to lose a father, and what it takes to face him again.