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 summer 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 Israel about whether she had any concerns about the film’s content being too specifically Jewish and anyone having trouble finding a way in to its content if they didn’t know that world:
“I wanted to make a crazy Jewish movie. I wanted it to be so Jewish. My experience in film is that, and I think you know audiences are smart and if a film makes sense emotionally, you understand what’s going on, then there’s a lot that of cultural specificity that even if you don’t get it exactly, you kind of get it. You get the gist of what’s happening. I just wanted it to feel that real. I think that the big perspective of it, what I wanted to capture about Jewish community, is that we don’t get along a lot of the time and we’re actually a culture that widely embraces disagreement and argument and how can we really, really strongly disagree and argue it out and still hold together. That to me is one of the things I love most about the feeling of Jewish community and what I wanted to capture in the world, so we’re just like a group of misfits with each other and with the others.”
Watch the video above to hear about finding her terrific cast and how the film has been received at various film festivals around the country.
The Floaters opens in theaters beginning July 10th in New York City and expanding to other cities in subsequent weeks.
