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Now playing, a familiar onscreen presence: Life .

Social realism is a term that makes some people queasy. On the one hand, it evokes propagandistic Soviet films wielded as oppressive motivational tracts; on the other, it can imply a condescending, conflict-denying, family-of-man sentimentality. But “Amreeka,” the opening film of the 2009 New Directors/New Films series on Wednesday, reaffirms social realism’s validity as humanistic art with an educational frisson.

The feature film debut of Cherien Dabis, a New York director and screenwriter born to Palestinian-Jordanian immigrants, “Amreeka” also sets the internationalist tone of the annual series, presented by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Most of the 25 films in this year’s series, which has screenings through April 5 at the museum and at the Walter Reade Theater, were selected from festivals from around the world, with Sundance the most important contributor.

“Amreeka” follows the odyssey of Muna (Nisreen Faour), a Palestinian woman living on the West Bank who receives a green card and moves to the United States with her teenage son to live with her sister’s family in a small town in Illinois. Their troubles begin at a Chicago airport where, after a humiliating interrogation, the tin of cookies in which she had foolishly stored all her money is confiscated.

Because the movie is set during the onset of the war in Iraq, Muna, her son and her sister’s Palestinian-American family must contend with anti-terrorist paranoia manifested in taunts and vandalism. Muna worked in a bank in Ramallah, but the only job she can find in the United States is flipping burgers at a White Castle; meanwhile her son, desperately trying to fit in, grimly makes his way through the American high school jungle.

The film is anchored in Ms. Faour’s wonderful portrayal of a warm-hearted, self-reliant woman stretched to the breaking point who perseveres in the face of overwhelming obstacles. If the film offers a little too much rose-colored uplift for comfort, its essential integrity remains intact.

Given the economic vulnerability felt by so many Americans these days, the half-dozen or so films shown during the series’s first week that have social- or neo-realist associations have a particular resonance. To New York audiences watching “Treeless Mountain,” set in South Korea; “Ordinary Boys” (Morocco); “The Shaft” (China); “The Maid” (Chile); “Unmade Beds” (London); and “The Fly” (Russia), the characters’ survival issues may not seem so remote.

Even the American documentary, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo’s “Every Little Step,” which observes the casting of the 2006 Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” portrays existence as a ferocious Darwinian struggle. The film is a self-reflecting mirror in which the show and the movie about creating the show become one and the same.

A dream of stardom that collides with reality also inspires one of the three connected stories in “The Shaft,” Zhang Chi’s eloquent movie about a father, a son and a daughter who live in a remote coal-mining town in western China. During this rigorously structured work, in which the camera regularly retreats to show a train bearing coal from the mine where the local men labor, the children’s need to flee the nest (the son has pop star ambitions) conflicts with their sense of duty. The father, a stoic fatalist near retirement age, shows signs of terminal lung disease.