Wendy Ide 

The Nettle Dress review – a husband’s grief becomes a thing of beauty in lyrical documentary

Dylan Howitt’s moving film follows textile artist Allan Brown as he painstakingly weaves a dress from foraged nettles after the death of his wife
  
  

textile artist Allan Brown in the middle of shoulder-high vegetation in a bright green woodland setting, foraging for nettles
Labour of love… textile artist Allan Brown out foraging in The Nettle Dress. Photograph: Dylan Howitt


There’s an almost fairytale-like quality to the subject of this lovely, poignant documentary: after the death of his beloved wife, a man spends seven years crafting a hand-spun dress from foraged nettles. Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty. The laborious process – from gathering bushels of the plants in the woods, labrador at heel, to spinning the fibres of the stalks into thread and weaving the thread into a rough-hewn fabric – is captured with a lyrical sensitivity by film-maker Dylan Howitt’s unobtrusive camera.

Watch a trailer for The Nettle Dress.
 

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