A lost boy walks slowly through Tel Aviv’s central bus station. Two soldiers pass him, and he turns away to avoid being noticed. Yet there’s nothing noticeable about him—brown hair, blue eyes, a chin just beginning to widen into adolescence—except the mix of fear and determination that shows when the camera zooms in on his face. He asks a passerby, perhaps too quietly to be heard, “Do you speak Arabic?,” but the man rushes by.

The boy is Khaled, the main character of the new Israeli film The Sea. The day before the bus-station scene, Khaled’s class in a West Bank village near Ramallah set out on a trip to the beach, a place that stands for all that is nearly out of reach for Palestinians living under occupation. When the children’s bus reached the checkpoint to enter Israel, a soldier told the teacher that Khaled was barred from entering, an inscrutable dictate of the authorities. His classmates were allowed in. Brought home, Khaled decided to set off for the sea on his own, and crossed under the border fence with Palestinian men who work without permits in Israel. Thus begins a harsh yet delicately portrayed version of the classic journey of a boy into a dangerous, foreign world.

The Sea is an Israeli production, even though it is one that blurs the line between “Israeli” and “Palestinian.” The first frame of the film acknowledges funding f