Tell Me Everything by Moshe Rosenthal won Best Picture at the Ophir Awards at a ceremony at Cinema City Glilot on Wednesday night. The Israeli Academy of Film and Television voters gave it an unprecedented 16 nominations, and it won 10 awards.
Tell Me Everything will go on to be considered as Israel’s official selection for the Best International Feature Academy Award.
In addition to Best Picture, Tell Me Everything won an Ophir for its director, Moshe Rosenthal, and he also won for his screenplay. The movie tells the story of a boy who learns that his father is gay at the height of the AIDS epidemic and makes amends with him a decade later.
At the first Ophir Awards ceremony since the war in Gaza ended, there was a rare feeling of genuine joy and even solidarity.
Hosts Adam Gabay and Shani Cohen provided the wittiest and least grating banter in years – perhaps in history – as they drew laughs with jokes, like when they said they were about to show a video of greetings from government officials who wanted to give their blessings but couldn’t attend the ceremony, and then showed – nothing.
It was a reference to the fact that government officials, such as Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar, have been bashing the Ophirs and the entire Israeli film industry. Zohar even set up an alternate awards ceremony that nominated and gave prizes to different movies from the Academy.
Moshe Rosenthal takes top Ophir honors
He was particularly vitriolic against last year’s Ophir winner, Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, about a Palestinian boy lost in Israel, which also won awards for its two lead actors, Muhammad Gazawi and Khalifa Natour, who are both Palestinian. Zohar claimed this film’s win would embolden anti-Israel factions in the entertainment industry.
Whether it did is an open question, however, because few outside Israel seem to have seen it. The movie did not make the shortlist for the Oscars and was shown at very few international festivals, and none of the major ones.
This is indicative of another problem currently facing the Israeli movie industry, which was also referenced by Gabay, Cohen, and many of the winners and presenters at the Ophirs: the ever-growing anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and often antisemitic sentiments currently espoused by much of the international film industry, from Hollywood actors to the directors and executives of prestige festivals.
The hosts joked about the international boycotts facing Israeli cinema, saying that, “If we don’t applaud ourselves, who will?”
But Gabay added, “Israeli cinema did not give up and did not stop creating meaningful works, even during the not-so-fun period we’ve had here recently.”
An emotional moment that put this “not-so-fun period” front and center came when former hostage Omer Shem Tov, who was released in a hostage deal in 2025 after 505 days in Hamas captivity, presented the award for Best Casting, which went to Tell Me Everything.
An aspiring actor with great presence and movie-star good looks, Shem Tov said in an interview before the ceremony that he had studied acting at the prestigious Stella Adler Studio in New York following his release and spoke onstage about hoping to make it as an actor, and received an encouraging round of applause.
Evgenia Dodina, one of Israel’s greatest actresses, won a long-overdue Ophir Award as the heroine of Or Sinai’s Mama, where she played a Polish worker in Israel who goes home and finds she is an outsider in her own family.
Best Actor went to Ehab Salami for his performance as a lonely Palestinian Uber driver in Berlin who befriends a young Israeli passenger in Where To by Assaf Machnes. In a moving speech, after thanking his family and the cast and crew, he said, “Let the sun shine and let the wars end.”
Salami won an Ophir in 2021 for his performance in Eran Kolirin’s Let It Be Morning.
Best Supporting went to veteran actress Tiki Dayan for her role as the befuddled mother of a man who gives up carbohydrates in Shimon Shai’s Farewell to Dough. She paid tribute to her recently deceased colleague Ilan Dar in her speech. Dayan won a Best Supporting Actress Award for Ayelet Menahemi’s Seven Blessings in 2023.
Ido Tako won Best Supporting Actor for his role as a depressed Israeli in Berlin in Where To. Tako was nominated twice in this category; he was also nominated for his role in Tell Me Everything.
The Best Live-Action Short Film award went to Orit Fouks Rotem’s Another Body, written by and starring Dani Garmise as Miki, a musician paralyzed in his arms and legs whose encounter with a substitute Filipino caregiver raises questions of sexuality, intimacy, and desire.
Garmise, who wrote the screenplay, spoke passionately about the importance of talking honestly about disability and sexuality.
The award for Best Documentary went to Rotem Dimand for The Woman Who Didn’t Know How to Love, about three generations of complicated women in a single family.
Best Documentary Short went to Doron Jerasi’s Ahmad the Movie Star, which revisits the controversy surrounding the late Ram Loevy’s groundbreaking 1966 film I Am Ahmad, the first Israeli film to center an Arab protagonist.
Jerasi’s film draws a parallel between the attacks on Loevy’s film nearly 60 years ago and the controversy that followed The Sea’s Ophir victory last year. Ahmad Yusuf Masarwa, the protagonist of the movie, went onstage and spoke movingly of his hopes for a better future, and both he and Jerasi eulogized Loevy for his vision and talent.
The winner of the Life Achievement Award was the popular actress Levana Finkelstein, who won an Ophir Award for the movie A Matter of Size and who has received acclaim for roles in movies such as The Farewell Party, I Love You Rosa, The Little Traitor, The World is Funny, and many other roles.
She has always shone in both drama and comedy, and recently played a key role in the Emmy-nominated television series Bad Boy. The audience gave her a standing ovation.
While the mood was upbeat, there was a shadow over the ceremony, and that was the Academy’s choice to snub the latest movie by Avi Nesher, Our Loves, which is about several people who think they are having the worst day of their lives on October 6 and then must contend with the horrors of October 7, 2023. It was nominated for 12 Ophirs and won zero.
Nesher is Israel’s most beloved veteran director, but the Academy has consistently undervalued his work. I felt Our Loves was a deeply moving and cinematically inventive drama about October 7, which was not only the best Israeli film of the year, but also the country’s strongest potential contender for an Academy Award nomination.
Its failure to win even one Ophir continues a strange, decades-long pattern in the Israeli Academy’s treatment of Nesher, whose critically acclaimed, successful films have been embraced by audiences, becoming modern classics frequently shown and rewatched on movie channels, while Academy voters ignore them.
Our Loves will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and has drawn the attention of Danny Cohen, the president of Access Entertainment and former BBC director of television, and Fernando Szew, president and head of FOX Entertainment Studios, who signed on as producers and executive producers on Our Loves.
But the Academy did not see this stirring drama, which is also very critical of the government for failing to save more people on October 7, as worth a single prize.
This criticism should not be confused with the government’s political attacks on the Academy: The Sea was a worthy Best Picture winner last year, and Salami richly deserved his Best Actor award Wednesday night.
The problem is not the politics of the films the Academy rewards, but an insularity that has too often led it to overlook one of Israel’s most accomplished filmmakers while elevating films that quickly disappear from the cultural conversation.
We will know if Tell Me Everything made the Oscar shortlist on December 15. Israel has not made the shortlist since 2017 and has not had a nomination since 2012, when Joseph Cedar’s Footnote was nominated.
All in all, Israel has had 10 nominees in this category, formerly called Best Foreign Language Film, with no wins, making it the most-nominated country without a win.