The Winter of the Beard Trailer (2010)

Trailer for the documentary The Winter of the Beard.

In the fall of 2005, two filmmakers invited seven men across America to join them in an experiment. They would stop shaving for six months; no trimming allowed. Each received a video camera and weekly interview questions to document his experience. The resulting 600 hours of intimate footage revealed a group of men traversing the same rite of passage from different vantage points. Throughout the process, the men told stories from their pasts, shared likes and dislikes, and confessed personal fears and aspirations. They laughed and cried, hid and came alive behind their beards. The tireless filming captured bad days and good ones, and it is in this framework that the individual stories stand out and the beards fade into the background. From a son dealing with his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s, to financial and marital struggles, to the simple problem of a mustache growing over a mouth, The Winter of the Beard reveals the trials and tribulations of what it means to drastically alter one’s appearance and otherwise go on living.