Though The Holy Land tells a star-crossed love story involving an earnest young Israeli yeshiva student (Oren Rehany) and a cynical Russian prostitute (Tchelet Semel), one of its great strengths lies in its surprising universality. Rehany's Orthodox Judaism casts a shadow over his transgressions, but once Semel cuts off his telltale side-curls (an act as heavy-handed as the lively, irreverent film gets), he could just as easily be a naïve college freshman struggling to make sense of dorm life's Dionysian excesses. Refreshingly unsentimental, The Holy Land opens with Rehany fighting a losing battle to keep his mind on God and his hands off his excitable genitalia. Noticing his divided attentions, the student's spiritual mentor suggests that he satisfy his raging lust with a visit to a prostitute, a bit of questionable advice he justifies by arguing that visiting a hooker merely violates rabbinic law, while neglecting his studies constitutes a grave scriptural violation. Rehany takes his rabbi's advice by visiting a strip club, where he is ushered into the world of sex with a brisk backroom hand job from Semel, who looks like Leelee Sobieski after years of hard living. Instantly smitten, Rehany leaves his family and takes a job working for bar owner Saul Stein, who mentors him in the ways of hedonism and watches his young charge's piousness dissipate in a blur of marijuana smoke, liquor, and surging hormones. The rough-edged but goodhearted Stein sees Rehany less as an Orthodox Jew gone wild than as a sweet, naïve, open-hearted kid eager to learn about a scary and exhilarating new secular world. Thankfully, the film sees him the same way. Orthodox Jews and Russian prostitutes each come with a lot of cultural baggage and preconceptions, but what makes The Holy Land so refreshing is how easily it discards all that in order see its characters as the flawed but essentially good human beings they are. Rehany perfectly captures his character's giddy adulation at breaking free of the rules that have governed his life, but the film's most touching and unexpected performance belongs to Semel, who leaves tantalizingly open the question of how much her affection for Rehany is genuine and how much is the professional flirtatiousness of a woman who makes her living manipulating the sexual impulses of men. The Holy Land netted writer-director Eitan Gorland a "Someone To Watch" nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards, but his assured debut suggests that he's already a formidable, fully developed talent.