Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe
Synopsis
This documentary delivers an artful and unexpectedly entertaining look at what is often ignored as a mundane chore. It’s a film about ironing, but it also a meaningful meditation on so much more.
The story follows four dynamic Cajun women in French Louisiana as they go about their daily lives demonstrating how the simple ritual of ironing weaves its way throughout the fabric of family life and their sense of identity. Ironing, we learn from them, is a nurturing, emotional, and learned process, transmitted from mothers to daughters.
Through first-person narration, the women share with us a rare look at the rich interior life lived by wives and mothers in a traditional culture. By the films end, we see that for them, and for their mothers, ironing has been as necessary to self respect as cooking is to eating.
