The film, subtitled "The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust," is having its world- premiere theatrical release at the Wilmette Theater.

"The Optimists" has already won a number of awards at film festivals, including the Peace Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. It was directed by Comforty and written and produced by Comforty and his wife, Lisa. The couple lives in Evanston.

The full-length documentary tells two interwoven stories, one of Comforty's own grandfather, Rachamim Comforty, and one of his fellow Jews of Bulgaria. It's one of the lesser-known and more inspirational stories of the Holocaust: how all 50,000 Jews were able to survive despite the intensive efforts of the Bulgarian government to deport them to death camps. Some of the men spent time in labor camps, but most were protected and saved by their Christian and Muslim neighbors and eventually made their way to Israel.

On a deeper level, the film is an examination of the nature of good and evil and why some people go out of their way to help their neighbors even when doing so puts them at risk.

Israeli-born Jacky Comforty had been working in TV and film, making comedies, short subjects and documentaries, for more than 20 years when the idea for "The Optimists" was born. It came from his father, who, after his retirement, began acting in some of his son's films.

"One day he said, 'There is one story you really should tell-the story of how we were rescued during the war,'" Comforty related during a recent interview. It was a story that was new to him. Like many Holocaust survivors, his parents had told their children little about their wartime experiences. But on that day in 1984, "I took a little tape recorder and he and my mom began telling their stories," Comforty says.

He immediately decided to make a film based on their recollections, but knew he needed more information. So he spent the next four years "reading everything I could get my hands on about the Holocaust in Bulgaria." During that time, his father died.

Comforty was in Israel, going through his father's and grandmother's things, when he came upon a treasure stashed away in an apartment that had belonged to his grandmother: shoeboxes filled with photographs from her early life in Bulgaria, some 1,500 of them.

"There were beautiful postcards and photos," Comforty says, "including postcards from all my grandmother's admirers who wrote her from the front during World War I. A lot of museums wanted us to donate the collection to them." But he knew that he could use the photos in the film that was now becoming more of a reality to him.

"Once we had the photos, we were aware that we had a huge treasure here, and the journey began," Comforty says. That journey took him to Bulgaria, where- speaking his first language, Bulgarian- he interviewed more than 100 citizens and researched the history of the country's Jews not just during the Holocaust but much farther back.

What he found was a unique community that traced its roots to an ancient tribe of Jews called Romaniots who spoke a Greek dialect and came to the country during King Solomon's time. Even centuries later, Bulgarian Jews considered themselves Sephardic. They spoke Ladino, an ancient Jewish-Spanish language, and had an advanced and highly sophisticated culture. In the 14th century there was even a Jewish queen of Bulgaria, Comforty relates.

The history transfixed him. "It's truly a fairy tale," he says. "It's a story I could work the rest of my life-an unknown story."

Comforty was still learning Bulgarian history when the demise of communism provided him with another windfall. "The doors of archives that had been closed for 50 years swung widely open," he says. "I was very lucky to be there at that time." He ended up with 5,000 more photographs relating to the Bulgarian Jewish experience. He also spent months going through film archives viewing "everything that was done on film in Bulgaria from the beginning of motion pictures that had to do with Jewish subjects."

Although he was still working on other films to make a living and to finance his research in Bulgaria, that undertaking became his obsession.

"Growing up in Israel, you go to archaeological sites, you look on the ground and hope to find maybe a coin, but you never do," he says. "In Bulgaria, everywhere I found treasures. I went to a synagogue that was closed for 50 years and found manuscripts, ancient books with layers of dust on them. It was like in a fairy tale.

"Once you get into the mood of a collector, you cannot stop," he says. "I was trying to satisfy a hunger that would not calm down."

Over the next 12 years, Comforty and his wife, whom he calls "Bulgarian by marriage," worked slowly on the film while making 40 unrelated documentaries to finance their work. (Even so, he says, "I was barely paying my bills. I felt like I was digging a tunnel out of jail.") Originally Comforty planned to make a four-part series. "There were so many things I wanted to tell," he says. "The rescue of the Jews during the war was the result of all the history that went before it. I needed to explore it all."

He suggests that one of the reasons Bulgarians refused to hand their Jewish neighbors over to the government can be found in the centuries of peaceful coexistence between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Bulgaria and the fact that they faced a common enemy, the Turks, who oppressed the country for nearly 500 years.

Finally, he decided that such a big project was unmanageable and settled for making one film, with hopes to do the series eventually.

Even filming "The Optimists" was a huge job. "It really was like archaeology- taking something apart in tiny little shreds and trying to put it all together and make a very small piece," Comforty says. "It was overwhelming." The film took four years to edit and had 6,000 cuts-Comforty says 500 to 800 is the average.

The final version has received awards and praise at a number of film festivals, but Comforty says he can't take all the credit for that.

"When you make a film, there is a certain group dynamic that is beyond your control," he says. "It's not just me or my skill or my art, but the personalities in the film, the people who were rescuers, the people whose hearts were in the right place."

Those people included a teacher who allowed four Jewish girls-including Comforty's mother-to become kindergarten teachers even though Jews were officially not allowed into the classroom. Another story details the efforts of a baker, who, ironically, hid Jews in his oven.

The title was chosen to work on several levels, Comforty says. The Optimists was the name of a jazz band that was highly successful in Bulgaria before the war. One of the heroes of the film is the sax player, who tells of how a friend saved him at the last minute, just before he was about to be put on a train and deported. Later, he recalls putting on an opera in a labor camp.

The title also has a symbolic level, Comforty says. It refers to the rescue of the entire community. "The film is dedicated to those who are optimists," he says.

Of course, that would include the Comfortys. Jacky Comforty gives a special nod to his wife, who, he says, "suffered quietly through this for many many years," writing "hundreds" of grants and making suggestions at every stage.

Now that the film has been released theatrically, Jacky Comforty's role in it is not finished, he says. He plans to be present at many of the screenings at the Wilmette Theater and to organize events around the film, bring in school groups, answer audience members' questions and engage in dialogues with viewers.

He stresses that "The Optimists" is not directed solely to Jews. "It's a film that's meant for all audiences, for all people," he says. "It's a unique story of individuals who resisted the government successfully. We don't have many people who do that."