BAHFF: The Nettle Dress

This screening includes a panel with the artist group SILT, local foraging expert Ella Milburn and short film director Tristan Sherfield. The panel will discuss heritage, nature and slow craft. 

Textile artist Allan Brown spends seven years making a dress by hand just from the fibre of locally foraged stinging nettles.

This is ‘hedgerow couture’, the greenest of slow fashion but also his medicine.

It’s how Allan survives the passing of his wife, leaving him and their four children bereft, and how he finds a beautiful way to honour her.

Stunningly filmed by award-winning documentary maker Dylan Howitt, The Nettle Dress follows Allan's journey through seasons and years, foraging, spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing the cloth, before finally sharing a healing vision of the dress back in the woods where the nettles were picked, worn by one of his daughters.

A labour of love in the truest sense, The Nettle Dress is a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft.

It’s one story representing a huge groundswell of people rediscovering the joys of making.

Actor Mark Rylance called the film “Exquisite and inspiring, beautiful and helpful for anyone suffering loss or grief”.