Ever wanted to know what it's really like to be a teen in Israel? The Boston Jewish Film Festival recently showed a documentary, True to Life, about Israeli teens' experiences in Ramla, a lower-class suburb near Jerusalem. What's really cool is that the film was made, produced, and shot by the teens who star in it.

True to Life is a documentary comprised of five 10–15 minute segments, each focusing on one teen's story. The common thread is that the teens all live in Ramla, which reminded me of poorer neighborhoods that one could find on the outskirts of any American city. Ramla is filled with small, cramped apartments where the residents have little access to good education, quality food or well-paying jobs. Most of the families living there are immigrants.

It is hard to comment on the documentary as a whole, since each segment is so different, but I enjoyed True to Life's depiction of the turmoil of low-income adolescence. The difficulties of adolescence are universal. Just like American youth, the Israeli and Palestinian teens struggle with their parents, independence, needing to depend on their friends, learning who they are and growing up. The issue of having immigrant parents who don't really understand their kids often comes into play, as some parents are from Ethiopia, Asia or elsewhere. Each individual segment shows the complexities of growing up caught between two cultures—the parents' homeland culture and modern Israeli/Palestinian society.

The first segment, Love on the Brink, explores 18 year-old Hasid's jealousy over his beautiful girlfriend, Yana. Hasid and Yana break up because he feels that Yana wears her clothing too tight. In the end they get back together and have a music video-worthy moment of frolicking on the beach at sunset. Hasid and Yana live in tiny apartments and their parents struggle with money, yet the young couple still has each other, which is more important than any possession. The story seems simple at times, but I like its message that love can make difficult times easier. The downfall of the segment is that I don't see Hasid and Yana work anything out. It doesn't seem like Hasid got over his jealousy. I would have rather seen their relationship develop more fully; I would have liked to see Yana confront Hasid and tell him that she has the right to wear whatever she wants.

The second segment, I'm Just 18, profiles an earnest Palestinian teen struggling against societal and parental rules that tell her that she should get married and stop going to school. Her parents are conservative and traditional, and want their daughter to be a proper Muslim. They want her to pray instead of going out with friends, and they eventually want her to be a housewife. The young teen wants to learn—to “live,” as she says at one point on the phone to a friend. She struggles with her parents' old-fashioned conservative views and her desire to be a normal teen in contemporary society.

Plauge of the First Born, the third segment, was my least favorite. Here, a young Israeli teen has trouble at home and at school. He is lazy and gets furious at his parents for favoring his older brother. His mom is a tired, poor, frustrated woman who doesn't know how to help her troubled son. I had a difficult time watching the teen scream at his mother before running off to make trouble with his friends while his mother cleans, cooks and works to support her family. Being a teen sometimes isn't easy, but neither is being a mom. I wished the protagonist in this segment would stop thinking that the world's biggest problem was that his brother gets to play video games longer than he does.

Motherless Haya was the most powerful segment. It tells the story of Haya, a young Ethiopian Israeli teen whose mother died while giving birth. Haya struggled through foster care and ended up finally living with her older brother in Ramla. During the course of the story, Haya struggles with feeling lonely and isolated in her small, empty apartment after school. She desperately wants to feel loved and to have a family. Haya's friends play a central role in this film. They take care of her and decorate her world—literally when they give her bare room a makeover. This beautiful, touching story shows how universal our need for people who care about us is and how even in the worst of times, friends can make things a little more bearable.

Each segment shows a teen's struggle and their hope of overcoming of their obstacles. What I found most powerful about True to Life was the universality of its message. Teens are teens anywhere! That universality made it very easy to connect to the teens in True to Life —they are going through exactly what we go through as American teens. I also appreciated that the teens actually shot and made this film. It shows that they actually care about these issues and one another's lives, and hope their audience does, too. I know I did.