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What began in 1999 was, at first, just a favor for Jeremiah Zagar's mother. But when father and son went together to an isolated shack in West Virginia, Jeremiah's father Isaiah, a mosaic tile artist, became very honest.

"He began telling me stories with an intimacy that I felt would be the starting point for making a movie," said Zagar.

The film Jeremiah Zagar ultimately created from the footage of his father, "In a Dream" (inadreammovie.com), includes what his father shared with him on that West Virginia trip.

"He told me about how he was molested as a child, how he tried to kill himself at the age of 29, and how he fell in love with my mother the night that he emerged from a Pennsylvania mental institution," Zagar wrote in his director's note for the film.

In an interview with The Jewish State, Zagar described how these intimate conversations "leveled the playing field" between father and son. "We became more than just father and son; we became peers," he said. "When he is speaking to me in that intimate way, he is no longer speaking down to me or above me, as fathers do to sons. He is speaking honestly, in the most human way, and I am absorbing it, his humanity, as a peer."

Over the next four years, Jeremiah, in college at Emerson, continued filming his family whenever something significant happened -- a birthday, a funeral, a lawsuit, a mural workshop. In April 2005, he returned home to film his stressed-out family -- his parents were picking up Zagar's brother from rehab -- when suddenly his father told his mother about a three-year affair with his assistant, and his mother walked out. As a filmmaker Zagar kept the film rolling, but as a son he was not so happy.

"I shot 16 hours that day and hated myself for every minute of it," he wrote.

The film took seven years to complete, and through it Zagar hit his stride as a documentary filmmaker. In the beginning, he hadn't thought the footage of his father would add up to a film, but it developed as he filmed it and lived with it.

"It was like a metamorphosis or a love affair," he said. "You don't plan those things -- my relationship with this person is going to be this. You say, 'I love this; I want to be involved in this every day'; and what it grows into is hopefully something you'll be proud of."

Even though Zagar let the film develop organically, he did have some big ideas about what it might be.

"I wanted to combine stylistically the surreal beauty of narrative film with the very visceral, very real element of documentary film," he said. And since the film was about his multifaceted father, he said, "I wanted to tell a big epic story, but I didn't know what it would be, what it would evolve into."

Zagar has always loved movies, and he remembers getting booklets of tickets as presents for holidays and birthdays as a child. Zagar made his first film, a documentary on homelessness in Washington, D.C., at age 15 with his childhood friend Jeremy Yaches, who has produced many of his films and co-founded Herzliya Films with Zagar. The two young men met at Akiba high school in Philadelphia, and their relationship got more intense during a semester in Israel at Alexander Muss High School when Zagar saved Yaches's life after he collapsed on a beach in Herzliya.

It was as a sophomore at Emerson that Zagar created his first serious film, "Delhi House." His mother, who owns a store that sells Latin American folk art and runs tours to Mexico, encouraged him to go to India, which for her was the only place as exciting as Mexico.

Zagar was supposed to stay with close family friends and shoot a documentary about an artist. But when the artist was difficult to pin down, he linked up with an orphanage these family friends were helping to support. His idea was to create a marketing piece to help the orphanage raise money.

"It was an intense and horrific experience, but exciting that I made a movie that I was proud of," Zagar said. Then, as a result of Yaches' efforts, that 10-minute film went all over the world and eventually aired on PBS. Because subsequent films continued to get international play, Zagar was able to raise the money he needed to create "In a Dream."

Zagar grew up in Philadelphia. His mother's store, which is covered with her husband's work, was his parents' first home. His father was able to do art full-time, because he combined it with real estate. His parents would buy the buildings that would serve as giant canvases for his father's mosaics. Then Isaiah would rehab the buildings and rent them out to fund his art.

"When they were young, they were incredibly poor, living in a slum neighborhood," Zagar said. "It was the '60s; they were buying for nothing and renting for nothing. Now it is one of the most popular neighborhoods in Philadelphia."

Jeremiah's father, an artist since he was 4, has an idiosyncratic view of what it means to be an artist. Jeremiah explained, "He sees being an artist as the only vocation and the most important vocation one can have. He also considers almost everyone an artist: policemen, chefs, and firemen. The most important thing is to care deeply about what you do and do it every day to make it your own; once you make it your own, it is art."

Although "In a Dream" does explore Isaiah and his art, it is primarily the human story that really excites Jeremiah, how his parents saved their marriage and themselves. He explained, "Forty-three years of a marriage is more than a marriage. It is the building blocks of who you are as people. My parents without each other were empty. They had begun to fall apart as a couple prior to the affair, but what the affair ultimately proved is that without each other, they felt much less complete as people. The movie is really like a quirky love story, a realistic view of what love is."

"In a Dream" will screen on Sunday, Oct. 18, 4 p.m., at the Jewish Center, 435 Nassau St., Princeton. Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar will be speaking.