In Rachel Israel’s The Floaters, Nomi (Jackie Tohn) reluctantly takes her old friend Mara (Sarah Podemski) up on her offer of a job working at their old smer camp, where Mara is now the director and in the middle of a war with a rival camp while dealing with other major repair issues she can’t afford.
Awards Buzz spoke with Tohn about how playing this part felt like her own experience growing up at camp:
“It doesn’t in that I was a camper when I went to camp and, in this movie, I’m a bad counselor. Well, I end up being okay. But it does mirror it in that my camp was Lokanda, which was upstate New York in a town called Port Jervis, which is literally the same town, tiny town, one stoplight, that Camp Tel Yehuda, that we turned into Camp David for the movie The Floaters, same town. So I was able to drop by my old camp and it’s really nice. Camp Daveed was, just seeing the bunks and the social hall and the cafeteria and it’s just like, shit, I’m back at camp. It’s not that hard to get into it when you’re in a practical setting like that.”
She explained how she was familiar with the Jewish content of the film and picked up quickly what she didn’t already know:
“I went to Jewish sleepaway camp. We had services on Friday night and Adon Olam and the whole thing. We weren’t kosher at camp, but it was kosher-adjacent. It’s not like we were serving things people couldn’t eat that were kosher, but I don’t think it was separate plating and all that stuff. We didn’t have treif spoons, though it was not a mystery to me what that meant. I had never heard of putting them in the ground and digging them underground, but I was a quick study.”
The Floaters opens in theaters beginning July 10th in New York City and expanding to other cities in subsequent weeks.
