A Best Documentary Oscar nomination has brightened the prospects of this brash, earnest, affecting film from B.Z. Goldberg, Justine Shapiro, and Carlos Bolado, and the intensified bloodshed in the Middle East has made its lesson of tolerance and reconciliation all the more urgent — though less likely to be heeded. For four years, Goldberg hung out with seven kids and their families on both sides of the Palestinian/Israeli divide, boys and girls with often intractably antithetical beliefs and backgrounds living no more than 20 minutes away from each other in Jerusalem. They include a Woody Allenish Chassidic kid with laissez-faire politics, a West Bank settler’s son who makes Ariel Sharon look dovish, a refugee-camp boy who supports Hamas and the murder of Jews, and twin brothers from a liberal Israeli family who seem open-minded enough to risk reaching out.

Under Goldberg’s guidance, this last pair do so, and by the end of the film he has brought some of these alienated youngsters together and demonstrated how precious and fragile such a bond is. The alternative, symbolized by the burning tire rolling down a rubble-strewn street that’s shown at the film’s opening and close, is the cycle of violence we watch every night on the news.