Central New Jersey's Third Annual Jewish Film Festival came to a triumphant close last week with a screening of Dear Mr. Waldman, attended by the film's writer and director, Hanan Peled.

The festival, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Central New Jersey and Temple Beth O'r/Beth Torah, featured four Israeli films, all winners of or nominees for Ophir Awards, Israel's equivalent of the Oscars: Three Mothers, Sweet Mud, Out of Sight, and Peled's film as the Nov. 5 finale.

The screenings, which began Oct. 15 and were held at Westfield's Rialto Theater, were all sold out.

A dinner held before that final show served as a "thank you" to the festival committee and a welcome to Peled and his family. JCC cultural arts and education director Michele Dreiblatt and the committee chairs agreed that the outcome leaves them with a welcome dilemma: For next year's festival, should they seek a larger venue, or stay with a setting that has proved so successful and leave it up to would-be audience members to act fast when the tickets go on sale?

Chatting at the dinner, Peled acknowledged with a smile his own success. Well-known in Israel as a scriptwriter for movies and television, including the Israeli version of Sesame Street, he still had a battle to persuade backers to let him try his hand as a director. His first film has been so well received, however, in Israel and in the United States, that he is having a much easier time finding backers for his second film, now in the works.

Vivian Toporek, who cochairs the cultural arts and education committee which helped organize the festival, interviewed Peled after the screening. She and a number of people in the audience asked about the extent to which Dear Mr. Waldman is autobiographical. The touching and sometimes harrowing film tells the story of a 10-year-old boy dealing with his survivor parents' scars from the Holocaust. Set in 1960s Tel Aviv, it is populated with many people who, like them, still struggle with nightmares about the horrors they survived.

Peled, a round-faced, genial man, answered with a brief picture of his own life. He was 40, not 10, when he — like the child in the movie — discovered that his father had lost a previous wife and a son in the Holocaust. The words used by the father in the film as he tells his son about that lost half-brother are exactly the ones his own father used. "I recorded him telling the story," Peled said. He also drew on the real-life affliction that proved such a bond between him and his father — their psoriasis — and used it as a symbol of family connectedness in the film.

Like the fictional father, his also noted that he had once shared a last name with an assistant to President John F. Kennedy. Truth and art diverge at this point, he said. Unlike the fictional father, Peled's had no illusion that Kennedy's assistant was actually his own son, miraculously saved and grown to a position of power.

Still, the director and his brother still felt burdened by their parents' terrible past. "We felt that somehow we had to compensate them for their grief and loss. You feel this is your duty — that this is why you came into the world," he said.

Asked whether making the film helped him find answers, Peled said it worked the other way around: "People think that you do art to resolve feelings, but that's not the case. You first have to come to grips with your personal feelings; then you can do something with them."

In his case, that took 12 years. After a trip to Germany with his father and a visit to concentration camps, he first wrote a book about the family's history, which was well received. He then struggled to find an approach that would translate into a film.

With Dear Mr. Waldman nominated for three Ophir Awards, Peled has begun to tackle his next movie project — another autobiographical story, this time concerning him and his brother, tentatively titled The Coldest Day of Winter. "It's kind of a continuation of Dear Mr. Waldman," he said.

As the evening drew to a close, Toporek told the filmmaker — to much applause — that the Jewish Film Festival organizers look forward to inviting him back in the not-too-distant future, when they screen that film. He chuckled and nodded in acceptance.