Winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, “My Father My Lord” opens commercially today at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Israeli writer-director David Volach’s feature debut is set within Israel’s ultra-Orthodox, highly insular Haredim community, a religious subculture within which Mr. Volach was raised. As a result “My Father My Lord,” an anguished, mordant sigh of a fable, packs an enormous amount of feeling and detail into a mere 73 minutes.

Menachem (Ilan Griff) is the wonderstruck only son of a scrupulously pious and emotionally remote rabbi (Assi Dayan) and a considerably more nurturing and doting mother (Sharon Hacohen-Bar). At the tender age when questions about the small world at home and the looming horizons beyond beget still more questions, Menachem is only getting half the answers. While he is drawn to the same paternal gravity his father’s congregation loyally enjoys, father-son outings and heart-to-hearts are almost exclusively devoted to Torah doctrine. Small wonder, then, that the boy tunes out school in favor of gazing at nature on the windowsill outside; his education begins when he wakes and ends when his father says good night.

With her head and heart less encumbered by matters of divinity and religious law, Menachem’s mother sees the boy’s less biblical needs for what they are and does her best to fulfill them within the rules of the household and religion, which are rigidly one and the same whenever Dad is home. Tellingly, Menachem’s mother good-naturedly quizzes her son on arithmetic, not Judaica. But when it comes to the eternal questions of childhood, such as whether animals go to heaven and have souls, Dad is the final word, and on these subjects he leaves no room for nuance. “Is this idolatry?” Menachem’s mother asks about a photograph her budding entrepreneur son has bartered at school. Her husband’s answer is furious and swift, and the tears it brings forth from her son mark a growing rift in parenting styles and perhaps marital affection.

Acceding to his son’s wish for a family holiday at the seashore, Menachem’s father nevertheless brings his work with him in the form of required prayers and devotions. Dad’s idea of a day at the beach is completely at odds with his son’s expectations for a good time and his wife’s understanding that little boys need to be closely watched while at play away from home. The vacation ultimately proves to be more of an escape than anyone would hope for when it is cut short by a tragedy that shakes the family to its ancient religious foundations.

A self-confessed devotee of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland’s celebrated secular poet of cinema who dramatized Hebrew Bible morality in his “Decalogue” films, Mr. Volach’s picture bears many of the strengths and the weaknesses of Kieslowski’s work. On the plus side, “My Father My Lord” reconnects with the latent power of religious devotion by reframing the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in a contemporary, albeit exotically cloistered, milieu. On the minus side, the ethical drawing and quartering that Menachem’s father undergoes by the film’s end borders on melodrama.

“My Father My Lord” is nevertheless a compact, well-made film that, though blunt in its accusations, is marvelously generous in its acute depiction of the unhurried experiential chaos of unsupervised childhood. For the most part, the picture navigates the harrowing shoals of belief, love, and tradition with an unusual combination of tenderness, grace, and deference.