Family film

NEW YORK - When Jeremiah Zagar was a chubby, awkward kid (his description - he's neither anymore), he and his father, Isaiah, marched from their house on South Street to the Ritz to watch Terry Gilliam's eye-popping fabulist fantasy, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Afterward, Jeremiah insisted they stay and watch it again. And again.

Two decades and innumerous movie marathons later, Zagar has applied that same obsessive passion to his own films. In a Dream, his documentary feature debut, opens tomorrow at the Ritz at the Bourse after spending a year on the festival circuit, nabbing prizes from San Francisco to Woodstock, N.Y., Austin, Texas, to Philadelphia. In August, it premieres on HBO.

In a Dream is about Isaiah - the Philadelphia artist whose giant coruscating mosaics adorn walls and buildings up and down South Street, through Bella Vista, Queen Village, and Society Hill. The film even landed on the short list for 2009 Oscar consideration. There was Jeremiah Zagar, jostling shoulders with 14 other candidates, including doc gods Werner Herzog and Errol Morris.

Jeremy Yaches, Zagar's producing partner and friend since high school (Akiba Hebrew Academy in Merion), called him that November day with the news.

"I was shaking," remembers Zagar, 27. "I was in the TLA video store on Locust Street, with my girlfriend . . . and I bought movies to celebrate. I bought the Criterion Collection of Down by Law, which I'd always wanted, and I bought Fiddler on the Roof, which I've never seen . . . and I bought [the graffiti documentary] Style Wars, and I bought an Ernst Lubitsch box set right there."

It should be noted that In a Dream is considerably more than a portrait of the engagingly eccentric, doggedly creative Isaiah Zagar. Begun when Jeremiah was a student at Emerson College, and going through numerous permutations over the eight years it's taken to get to the screen, In a Dream offers a close-up view of a family in crisis.

Isaiah, it turns out, is having an affair, and Julia Zagar, Jeremiah's mother, Isaiah's companion since the halcyon days of hippiedom, breaks down, and then breaks up the marriage - on camera. Jeremiah's older brother, Ezekiel, is in and out of rehab. Isaiah, now 69, reveals that he was molested as a youth (though he maintains that his relationship with his "mentor" was not transgressive).

The shards of dysfunction cut deep. And the fact that the man holding the camera, asking the questions, is the subject's progeny, makes the movie doubly profound.

"It's pretty gutsy to open up dark secrets in your family like this, and to not show your father in such a great light," says Sam Pollard, the Emmy-winning editor and filmmaker who helped Zagar with early cuts of In a Dream.

"There are things in the film that do not paint him as such a great, sweet man. So for Jeremiah to open that up, and to have his family be open to him opening it up, I thought was extraordinary on everybody's part. . . . It's a very powerful film."

Zagar, tall and bearded like his dad, has lived in New York since graduating from Emerson in 2003. He makes a living as an editor of indies and docs. He makes trailers for directors. He teaches filmmaking to middle schoolers. He hangs with a group of moviemakers he's known since college, if not before.

When he was 19, he went to India and shot Delhi House, a beautiful documentary short about a hospital and orphanage. It played at 2002's Slamdance festival and aired on PBS. Other shorts include The Unbelievable Truth, a fictional narrative about a man's life and his obsession with photography, and the animated Baby Eat Baby.

Over lunch in a cafe near his apartment in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, Zagar remembers his childhood and teen years in Philadelphia - going to the movies, renting movies, thinking movies, dreaming movies.

"That's all I'd ask for - a membership to the TLA and ticket booklets to the Ritz, and I would go five times a week, as much as I could," he says. "And then I started working at the TLA, in the gay porn section - that was the only spot they had open. So people would call up and they'd ask for different titles, like Rambone, and the problem was I'm dyslexic, so I couldn't spell, so I'd ask them to spell everything. And I'd get hung up on half the time, so they fired me.

"But they let me have the continued free membership, so I could rent up to five movies a night. I would just go down the list of directors - the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, John Huston, whoever I found . . . and I still do that, but now I want to own the DVDs."

Julia Zagar, who runs Eyes Gallery - the South Street emporium of Mexican and Latin American jewelry, crafts, and art - says that her son's dyslexia, and his difficulty with the printed word, were the key reasons he turned to film.

"He loves stories," she says in a phone interview. "The stories were the overpowering thing in his life, and actually allowed him to get over his disabilities. . . . The storytelling of movies. Movies, movies, movies."

He can't spell and has trouble writing e-mails, but Zagar says dyslexia has worked for him in some ways. There are logistical things he can't fathom, but Yaches, his friend and producer, deals with those.

"When I'm editing, I don't calculate at all. It's very instinctual," Zagar explains. "But I certainly would never make a movie if it weren't for Jeremy. I would never be able to raise the money, I would never be able to produce the shoots, I would never finish anything. I could have worked on In a Dream for another 10 years. . . .

"It's all about the process, it's all because I need something to do all the time, because I'm very manic and motivated. And if I don't have something to do - similar to my father - I get depressed. So I need to be working, no matter what."

Zagar's parents are back together; they've been in couples counseling. Julia says that watching the film now is like "looking at your photo album. 'Oh, did I look like that?' It feels like a while ago."

Isaiah says that their son's film has brought them closer, forced them to examine their lives and themselves.

"The film was and is still a catalyst in my life," says In a Dream's leading man. "It's like I'm watching a character in a film - yet having those aspects of my being revealed to me so clearly that I can't deny them."

And for Jeremiah, making In a Dream gave him a way into his family, into its soul. Armed with a camera - an instrument of exploration and revelation, but also protection - he was able to go places most sons (and daughters) fear to tread.

"That's what the camera does - it provides separation," he says. "You're able to ask difficult questions and say difficult things and engage in difficult situations that you normally wouldn't be able to engage in. Nobody wants to go to war, but if you have a camera it makes sense to be there. . . .

"Nobody wants to ask their father about being molested as a child, but with a camera you have purpose. Because what you hope is that the honesty of one person can affect the lives of many. So you feel liberated by this machine that allows you to capture those moments.

"It's afterward," he adds, "when you're thinking about what you've actually done - then it becomes difficult."