What does it take to make a new start in a new land, one that lets you earn a living and maintain your self-respect? Such a reinvention is never easy, especially when it takes place in middle age. Evgeny Ruman’s Golden Voices gently explores the challenge faced by two film dubbing stalwarts of the old Soviet Union, now transplanted to freewheeling Israel. The slow-paced, narrowly focused work is enlivened by intimate moments, wry humor, and characters to root for.

Part of a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing the collapsed Soviet Union in 1990, Raya and Victor Frenkel arrive in Tel Aviv in the dead of night. An acquaintance once known as Boris, and now reinvented as Baruch, offers them a cool, noncommittal welcome. In the old country, Raya (Mariya Belkina) and Victor (Vladimir Friedman) were celebrities of a sort, dubbing Russian voices on American films like Kramer vs. Kramer with actorly brio. Now the proud duo have washed up in a country where they have no status and, more alarmingly, no money. How are they to manage?

Raya, the more practical of the two, stumbles into a well paid phone sex operation that allows her to use her vocal skills and emotional intelligence in a different way than she’s used to. The scenes where Raya learns to fend off distaste, conceal her real age, and satisfy customers are funny and touching. Victor desperately wants to get back into dubbing, and so he throws in his lot with a couple of small-time video bootleggers. He doesn’t know Raya’s actual occupation, although he senses something’s odd. Victor’s discovery of what Raya really does and her growing attachment to a bumbling client from work will toss wrenches into a relationship where all the two really have is each other.

Golden Voices milks some pathos from the plight of its protagonists, who for all their pride and occasional self-deception are solid, decent people. It also provides some understatedly sly commentary on a society where the rule is hustle or perish. The film’s production design evokes the scrappy, borderline-grimy analogue vibe of the pre-internet world, a tough place to make one’s way.

Friedman portrays a rigid character, while Belkina shines with a nuanced performance that reveals Raya’s romantic dreams and reawakened curiosity. Acting props also go to Evelin Hagoel as Raya’s shrewd but affectionate boss and Elizabeth Kon as the sharper half of the video-pirating pair—cool female characters in a movie where women are almost always more clued-in than the men.