Jacky Comforty
has become quite familiar with the weapons of mass dissemination.
After working more than 12 years and spending in excess of
$1-million, much of it raised from family and friends, the Evanston
documentarian’s magnum opus, “The Optimists,” has its theatrical
world premiere Friday at the Wilmette Theater.
Comforty is not about to let that event go unnoticed. In the past
few weeks, he has fired off some 3,000 e-mails and whipped out
10,000 posters, flyers and postcards.
“I'm doing a lot of guerrilla marketing,” he said with an
easy-going smile, momentarily relaxed in his home office in
Evanston.
The smile masks great determination. Comforty declares he is so
eager for people to see this film, the story of how Bulgaria’s
Sephardic Jewish population, including his parents, were saved from
extermination by the Nazis during World War II, that he would track
people down and screen it for them one at at a time for 20 years if
necessary.
That may sound like hyperbole — one hopes it is — but given
Comforty’s unrelenting purposefulness in completing “The Optimists,”
the image of him chasing a viewer down the street, pulling a cart
with a projector behind him, does come to mind.
Back to the beginning
Pioneer Press first wrote about “The Optimists” four years ago,
when Comforty and his wife and partner, Lisa, were putting finishing
touches on a video version for screenings at film festivals around
the world.
His parents had always asked him to tell the story of how the
Jews of Bulgaria survived, but the best he had been able to do was
record his father’s memories of imprisonment in a forced labor camp
on audio tape. The 1940s population of Bulgarian Jews — long since
emigrated to Israel — had left little record on film.
One afternoon in 1988, however, Comforty and his wife were
cleaning out his late grandmother’s apartment when they made an
astonishing discovery: 1,500 photographs of Bulgarian friends and
family stored in dust-covered shoe boxes. Then they learned his
maternal grandmother also had saved 1,000 photos from the same
period.
Comforty suddenly had a very big job on his hands. Beginning with
those photos, he and Lisa worked for years to piece together how
acts of conscience by individuals in the Bulgarian Parliament, the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church and sympathetic lawyers, writers,
educators and trade unionists, had thwarted the Nazi final solution.
“The Optimists” records the harrowing events of March 10, 1943,
when 8,500 prominent Jews including Comforty’s father and his
family, were rounded up to be shipped on trains to the Treblinka
death camps. At the end of the day, they were simply told to go back
home. Government officials had used bureaucratic technicalities to
deny the deportation.
“This is what should have happened everywhere,” said Comforty of
the acts of courage documented in “The Optimists,” which has drawn
standing ovations from audiences at film festivals around the world.
“This should not have been the exception. This should have been the
norm.
“That’s especially important today, where there is a lot of
similarly bad stuff going on in the world. I hope this film will
have the power to motivate people to be good and courageous and to
stand for what they believe in.”
“The Optimists” has racked up more than 20 awards since 1998
including the Peace Prize at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, but it
also has left the Comforty family more than $300,000 in debt. Yet
Comforty was willing to spend another $100,000 to have a
color-corrected, audio-filtered 35mm print made for theatrical
distribution.
“It’s been a little Don Quixotean,” admitted Comforty, who has
some solace in the knowledge that a theatrical run qualifies the
film for long shots like consideration for an Oscar. “But I knew if
I did not finish this now I would not be able to move beyond it.
“When you realize you’re alone on a project, it can be a powerful
motivation. You know if you don’t do it, it won’t get done.”
Jacky Comforty will speak at the 6 and 8 p.m. screenings of “The
Optimists” Friday-Sunday and on subsequent weekends during the
film’s run at the Wilmette Theater, 1122 Central Ave., Wilmette.
Call (847) 251-7411.
Pioneer
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