Starring Sirak M. Sabahat, Yaí«l Abecassis, and Roschdy Zem. In Hebrew, French, and Amharic with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 7, at the Fifth Avenue Theatres

The awkwardly translated title Live and Become is close to the admonition parents should, and could, give every child as an existential birthright. The original French name actually translates to the more active Go, See, and Become, and that's a challenge handed directly to the viewer as well.

One of the most striking stories of the season, this graceful movie tackles the enigma that is Israel from an outsider's perspective-that of a young Ethiopian boy, played disarmingly well, at different ages, by three different child actors, with handsome Sirak M. Sabahat taking over as the dreadlocked teen in the final third.

Bucharest-born, Paris-based writer-director Radu Mihaileanu, working from the original script he fashioned with Alain-Michel Blanc, tackles a massive amount of material that spans a 10-year period. But whether looking at life in a refugee camp, examining the unspoken racism of everyday life in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, or delving into immigrant subcultures, the film always remains intimate in scale.

Certainly, its origins are outsized, as we see the boy's Christian mother, before dying in a barely protected U.N. camp, pass her child off as a Jew in time for Israeli commandos to spirit some of the refugees back to their country, ahead of a vicious civil war. Once transplanted, the now-renamed Schlomo faces scorn and confusion. But he is blessed with a solid adoptive family led by a loving, beautiful mother (Yaí«l Abecassis), a tough, leftist father (Roschdy Zem), and understanding, if sometimes rivalrous, siblings who sometimes speak French.

Initially wary of the whole experience, and obviously yearning for his late mother, Schlomo is a tough nut to crack, and Mihaileanu (hard-edged in Trahir and funny for Train de Vie) never strains to make his protagonist cute or conventionally appealing. Still, the boy learns Hebrew and other subjects quickly, and is too adept a survivor for anyone to dismiss for long. In the final analysis, the tensions within his new family, as in Israel itself, are more dramatic than anything imposed from the outside.

It's possible that the filmmakers try to fit in too much even for 140 minutes. A subplot involving the adult, army-bound Schlomo's romance with a cute, ditzy neighbour (Roni Hadar) with an irredeemably racist father isn't quite as convincing as other elements. No one aspect can undermine the integrity a movie as lovingly put together as this one-which is pretty much the point Mihaileanu is trying to make about Israeli society. He's at least asking Israel to look at itself in the mirror, and to do that without fear.