In the most striking bit of detail in Dan Wolman's otherwise-middling drama Foreign Sister, an overtaxed Israeli working mother (Tamar Yerushalmi) tries to get a moment of peace in her bathroom, but can't, because her husband has soaked the rug surrounding their toilet with urine, and the stench is too strong. She drops her magazine and goes looking for cleanser. Yerushalmi holds down a job while trying to cook for her family, keep the house clean, monitor her teenage kids, and look after her husband's mother, a task which includes cleaning her house. When Yerushalmi decides to ease some pressure by finding a maid for her mother-in-law, she hires Ethiopian immigrant Askala Marcus, whose own problems put Yerushalmi's into perspective and also draw the would-be Tel Aviv supermom into yet another social obligation. The more Yerushalmi gets to know Marcus and her extended network of African immigrants–most Christian, most illegal, and most too smart and sensitive for the menial jobs they're required to perform–the more wrapped up she becomes in making the lot of her "foreign sisters" better. The thinly veiled purpose of Wolman's film is to get his countrymen to see darker-skinned folk in a warmer light, so that Israelis might make the transition from thinking more kindly of immigrant workers to thinking more kindly of Palestinians. (Widespread distrust has led Israelis to open their society to hundreds of thousands of resident aliens willing to do grunt work.) But Foreign Sister never really confronts the question of whether Yerushalmi is being condescending in her offers of help to Marcus, save for one scene in which Marcus politely refuses a donation of old clothes, saying that she prefers the newer styles. Much of the movie is a parade of Africans revealing unexpected layers of depth to self-absorbed Israelis who, as Yerushalmi complains to her daughter at one point, are stuck "in their own bubbles." Wolman doesn't reveal much of Tel Aviv either, beyond a couple of houses, a couple of nightclubs, and scant glimpses of city streets. The writer-director's sole triumph lies in his credible depiction of a stressed suburban wife and mother whose life is so hectic that Foreign Sister's opening and closing credits have to be squeezed onto a TV set in her living room, while she dusts and vacuums. The particulars of her situation are well-imagined, but Wolman's characters remain little more than mouthpieces.