An unusually diverse lineup marks this year’s installment of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, happening November 6 to 13, mostly at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

Along with films tinged by history and ongoing conflict in the Middle East, there are several profiles of pioneers in entertainment. Quality Balls: The David Steinberg Story (November 12) is an excellent look at a comic innovator, and there’s also the blander Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love (November 7). Catch The Outrageous Sophie Tucker (also November 12) to rediscover an influential showbiz powerhouse; the movie is truly impressive, despite some irritating on-screen intrusions from her biographers.

The fest also includes a large Gallic delegation, with a half-dozen titles at least partially in French. Veteran Diane Kurys’s semiautobiographical For a Woman (November 11) is disappointingly soapy; more interesting is To Life (November 8 and 13), about filmmaker Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s mother and her Auschwitz-surviving sisters. Other titles hail from as far away as Argentina, with The German Doctor (on November 12) reimagining Josef Mengele among (mostly) innocents after the war.

Philosophically speaking, the fest’s most significant strain addresses the split modern folks often feel when divided between multiple cultures. Hanna’s Journey (November 8) follows a young German woman to Israel, where she meets a local fellow who wants to emigrate. And the similarly themed but far stronger Anywhere Else (November 10) tracks a somewhat spoiled grad student from Berlin to her family’s mildly poisonous bosom in Tel Aviv.

In fact, few films have captured the sense of international displacement better than this gentle, multigenerational comedy, which hits home truths that feel universal while being specific to contemporary Jewish angst. Its protagonist, called Noa, has trouble completing a college thesis on untranslatable words. (At times, foreign residents explain some of these words to the camera.) Intriguingly, the movie’s German title, Anderswo, translates more readily as Elsewhere, but first-time feature maker Ester Amrami, reached by Skype at her Berlin home, went with the English handle she felt summed up her character’s central dilemma.

“She’s one of those people who wants to be anywhere else other than where she actually is,” the director states in lightly accented English. “In a way, this is a generational thing, because people have so many choices now, and that can be confusing.”

Noa’s trajectory superficially matches the history of the film’s young director, who was born in north-central Israel in 1979 and went to Germany more than a decade ago, fell in love with a Berliner, and struggled with school and homesickness. But there are significant differences.

“In some ways, the story is closer to the biography of my wonderful actress, Neta Riskin, who is still not well known but is starting to get good work. She also went to Berlin when she was younger but had a really hard time and finally gave up and went home.”

Amrami’s own educational challenges were of a much more positive kind. While waiting for word from a prestigious art school she was hoping to attend, the then 22-year-old, who arrived speaking almost no German, took an unpremeditated stab at filmmaking.

“I saw an ad for a short-film contest,” the director recalls, “and the deadline was midnight! My boyfriend at the time—now my husband—and I stayed up late writing a proposal. We missed the deadline, but sent it in and forgot about it. Then, the same week I got rejected by the art school, I got a letter from the Goethe-Institut saying they would give me loads of money to make my film. That’s how the whole thing started.”

After enjoying that first visit behind the camera, Amrami was accepted into the film school at Babelsberg, the huge former East German movie complex just outside of Berlin. What makes her first feature even more remarkable is that it was her graduating project. The superb effort, cowritten with husband Momme Peters, also stars Free Zone’s Hana Laszlo as Noa’s mother, for whom the daughter just can’t do anything right.

“Nobody fights like families in Israel,” says the filmmaker and brand-new parent, adding the kind of laugh that 3,000 miles can buy.