'Amreeka," a debut feature by writer-director Cherien Dabis, has the kind of warm touch and playful disposition that don't usually go with widespread approval from the august guardians of cinema's gates.

But "Amreeka" — as its title, the Arabic word for "America," indicates — has other things going on as well. This is a pointed, emotional story of a divorced Palestinian woman and her son, who immigrate to the United States just after the invasion of Iraq, a story that benefits from Dabis' background as a child growing up in the Midwest during the Gulf War as the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother.

This piquant film brings a keen and serious eye as well as that feeling for affectionate human comedy to this fraught situation, smartly avoiding both stridency and sentimentality in the process. "Amreeka" also showcases Palestinian actress Nisreen Faour. As the irrepressible Muna, she truly owns the picture.

"Amreeka" opens on the West Bank, where Muna works at a bank where she isn't appreciated and lives with a difficult mother who doesn't hesitate to criticize her weight. We see the life she wants to leave and the elements of it.

Still, hers is a comfortable middle-class existence (how often do we see that side of Palestinian life?) and when the green card she's forgotten she applied for for herself and her 16-year-old son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) comes through, Muna's not sure she wants it.

Her son casts the deciding vote when he reminds her that America will be "better than being prisoners in your own country." Or will it?

Helping Muna make her decision is that her sister Raghda (the great Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass) has been living in the United States for 15 years in Illinois, the wife of a successful doctor and the mother of three children.

At least that's the way it was before the Iraq invasion. Once Muna uncertainly navigates U.S. Customs, she discovers that the doctor's practice has been compromised by anti-Arab sentiment and that his older daughter Salma (Alia Shawkat) is having a hard time at school for the same reason. That situation plus a heartbreaking mishap at Customs puts Muna in desperate need of work of any kind.

"Amreeka" moves back and forth between what happens to Muna and the difficulties her son faces. America is more than they bargained for, as it always is, and it is the gift of this film that while it allows its characters' problems to recede, it does not glibly insist they've gone away.

•AMREEKA is a National Geographic Cinema Ventures release written and directed by Cherien Dabis. 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 for brief drug use involving teens, and some language. Opens today at Cinema City in Hartford.