Producer/director Paul Mazursky’s Oscar-nominated films, that include Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; Enemies: A Love Story; Harry and Tonto; Moscow on the Hudson; Next Stop Greenwich Village; An Unmarried Woman, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, have established his reputation as an eminent social commentator and master of popular culture. But in his first documentary, premiering May 13 at The National Center for Jewish Film, it is Mazursky who is mystified.

Yippee! A Journey to Jewish Joy follows the filmmaker on the annual Rosh HaShanah pilgrimage to the small Ukrainian town of Uman, burial place of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. “I am making the film to record an event - but am I also looking for joy myself?” he asks. "We liked the journey this avowed 'secular Jew from Brooklyn' makes into the fascinating world of orthodoxy and ritual," said NCJF Executive Director Sharon Pucker Rivo.

According to the online Breslov Research Institute, the Torah sage Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) was the great-grandson of Rebbe Yisrael, the Baal Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”), who founded the Chassidic movement. Born in Medzeboz, Ukraine, Rebbe Nachman died of tuberculosis at age 38 in Uman, where he had moved from Breslov six months prior. His followers have continued to emulate his teachings.

Mazursky’s optometrist, David Miretsky, rock musician Shmuel Levy, and Rabbi Ezriel Tauber told him about the three-day gathering of 25,000, mostly Chassidic, Jewish men. Though the Brooklyn-bred Mazursky began as a comedian and has acted in over four dozen films and television shows, including “Once and Again,” “The Sopranos,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he was unprepared, but up for the challenge.

“It's not gonna be the Four Seasons," Miretsky warned. His own observant friends deemed it crazy. “They have never been there, and don’t know,” he explained. Mazursky’s doctors urged him to abstain as well. But the 75-year-old director, who had a quadruple heart bypass in 1996 and wore a wrist sling from a recent fall in Santa Fe, nonetheless ventured, with two camera crews, from L.A. to mid-Oktoberfest Munich. Arriving in Uman at 3 a.m. with no food or place to sleep, they were soon six-to-a-room in a rental. Mazursky ebulliently takes us through the hardly palatial environs.

"Reb Nachman's approach to Torah is through the heart,” says Miretsky. “When you cry, it means you are denying G-d's wisdom." Levy adds: “Very few people get up in the morning and say Yippee, I'm alive!.” But notwithstanding the wild post-Shabbas dancing replete with flame throwing and elevated drum sets, Chassidic House music reflecting the Kabalistic tenet that a song will herald the Messiah, and a scene that would rival any mosh pit (“it’s like the old Apollo!” marvels Mazursky), these men know the score.

Miretsky says Baal Shem Tov was told by his dying father to: “Love every Jew, and be scared of nobody but G-d.” When you’re evaluated at Rosh HaShanah, you want to have a good lawyer, he says - i.e., Reb Nachman and Baal Shem Tov. Levy agrees: “The connection with a Tzaddik carries through the year."

Following Shabbas, they travel to the Baal Shem Tov’s gravesite in Medzeboz. When Mazursky asks about the litter surrounding the ancient gravestones, he is told that trash cans are banned in Israel, and visitors are used to cleaning up themselves.

The film, which received praise from Larry King, Mel Brooks and Kirk Douglas, features interviews with locals, a nearby folk festival and a vodka celebration, as well as a charming melange of young Hasidic children dancing and playing. At holiday's end, split-scene cinematic, riverside praying opens to 25,000 of the assembled in deafening exuberance.

"It’s not that we’re mysogynist, but we’re in recovery," says neurologist and surgeon Dr. Julian Unger about the lack of women. "We need quiet time, with no distractions." Europeans, he says, realize that Europe drips with Jewish blood. Rabbi Nachman was from Breslov, 30 kilometers away, but chose Uman, where a massacre had occured in 1768. In 1941, the Nazis drowned all 1700 locals in the river. “Rebbe Nachman likely sensed future tides. It is an unbelievable irony that Jews should be dancing in the streets of Uman in 2005," he said. What moves Mazursky most is that his own grandfather, Sam Person, fled the area in 1905.

As he turns off the screen showing the wild dancing, a cleanshaven Mazursky turns to us and says he’s still secular, still the self-penned wise guy from Brooklyn. But he has learned tolerance and affection. "They were very kind to me, very generous. They fed me." No longer will he poke fun at yeshiva buchers. The final credits thank "over 25,000 beautiful Uman beings."

“Jews have had a lot of misery,” speculates Mazursky. “But on the other hand, you have the Catskills, all the great comedians.” Yippee is a Grateful-Deadesque road show, with Mazurky a bespectacled, bearded, and bemused Jerry Garcia, taking it all in. "Yippee! is, at heart, a road movie," agrees NCJF Associate Director Lisa Rivo. "And Mazursky is a terrific guide - funny, curious, and generous."