Bathroom Barber

Their relationship has been rooted in celebrating childhood. They grew up as campers attending a Jewish overnight camp in New Hampshire. Bathroom Barber situates itself in a summer where the once campers have become counselors. Tasked with children of their own to care for, they are thrust into a cyclical masquerade of helping the campers define themselves while still forming identities of their own. Through a whirlpool of masculinity, hormones, and alcohol, Bathroom Barber presents fraternity-like tableaus of young men seeking their own sense of adulthood and autonomy. Having built relationships in an environment that uses Jewish practices to speak about divinity, they co-opt the frameworks taught to them as children to reach their own sense of holiness. Beneath scenes of boyhood and trivial forms of passing time, the performance of Jewish rituals reveal themselves. A moment of men grooming at first appears as a homoerotic bathroom scene, but upon further inspection captures the men practicing the 30th day of a Judaic mourning rite referred to as Shloshim. Moments like this remind the viewer that the men, although having once championed childhood, now celebrate early adulthood.