"Life doesn't give you a script," says Nir Bergman, the 35-year-old writer-director of the moving Israeli drama Broken Wings. "But it does give you material. It gives you something to work with." In a phone interview from Israel, he explains that while his film, which deals with the dynamics of a tragedy-stricken middle-class family in contemporary Haifa, is not exactly autobiographical, "it does deal with my life. The characters are not me, but they are part of me -- they grew up with me."

Bergman also grew up with his share of problems: his earliest memory, from age four, was "of [the Yom Kippur] war, of going into a shelter and hiding." It's interesting, then, that Broken Wings eschews political content entirely, focusing instead on issues of domestic turmoil. Recently widowed Dafna Ulman (Orly Zilverschatz Banay) pulls double shifts as a midwife at a Haifa hospital, while her four children -- including aspiring musician Maya (Maya Meron) and acerbic high school dropout Yair (Nitai Gvirtz) -- try to pick up the slack at home.

It's an unfortunate by-product of the film's setting that you initially expect Dafna's husband to have been killed in a terrorist attack. The truth, though, is nothing so loaded: he died suddenly after an allergic reaction to a bee sting. The randomness of his death leaves the family scrambling not only to cope with their loss, but with their own anger at its preventability. Maya channels her hurt through her music, but her responsibilities to her younger siblings, Ido and Bahr (real-life brother and sister Daniel and Eliana Magon), prevent her from attending rehearsals. Meanwhile, the frustrated Yair ditches his chores, dons a mouse costume and hands out pamphlets in the subway.

There's a lot of suffering in Broken Wings, but the film isn't a downer. Bergman's triumph is to locate the vibrancy beneath his characters' sadness. When disaster strikes again for the Ulmans, in the form of a freak injury to Ido, the script gracefully sidesteps easy melodrama, and pays off our investment in the characters by having them react believably -- even if that means being disappointing or inappropriate. Maya's difficulties in putting her desires second -- which directly contributed to Ido's accident -- widen the gulf between her and her struggling mother.

The decision to forgo any explicit mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a sound one, and by making the film about emotions rather than opinions, it touches a more accessible nerve. There is nothing polarizing about familial strife.

"I didn't want to do the thing where I say, 'This is my movie, and I am from Israel, and so it has to have this political element,'" Bergman says, noting that in a deleted scene, Maya encountered a cab driver who lectured her on the virtues of conscription. "I had to think, 'What is more important: the truth of my views, or the truth of my characters?' And I made the second choice."

Another choice Bergman made was to cast non-professional actors in the leads. With the exception of Banay -- an Israeli TV and film veteran whose craft is evident in her portrayal of embattled matriarch Dafna -- the performers are first-timers. The role of Maya was written for Maya Meron (hence the matching names) with whom Bergman had collaborated on his student film, Sea Horses. But getting the then-19-year-old actress to commit to the role was difficult. "I think she was a bit scared," says Bergman. "She was in Amsterdam with her boyfriend, and we both had to talk her into it. She is a natural, but there was a lot in the part from her own life, and I think she thought it would be hard."

Whatever difficulties taking the role engendered for Meron, she nevertheless delivers a perfectly pitched performance, believably locating Maya's anxiety between adolescent desires (pop music, boys) and the raw tension that awaits her every morning outside her bedroom door.

The natural, unaffected performance and probing focus on everyday tribulations suggests that Bergman has been influenced by the kitchen-sink auteur Mike Leigh, but while he professes admiration for the British filmmaker, he says he owes his greatest debt to another source.

"When I was 17, I was living on my own with a VCR. And I must have watched Ordinary People 20 times. No, more. It got to where I couldn't watch the film with people because I would know and say all the dialogue. We couldn't eat -- I did Timothy Hutton's lines at the table."

With its handheld camera and modest style, Broken Wings seems half a world away from Redford's famously WASPy (and soapy) Oscar-winning film. But Bergman says that their impetus, however disparately expressed, is the same: to tell identifiable stories about ordinary people. "As independent filmmakers," he says, "we want to try to reach people the way that other films have reached us. And you don't want to be manipulating the audience, because we don't like being manipulated ourselves."