This film examines an unconventional inherited family object: hair and the range of emotions and memories that it can evoke. We show how people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preserved their loved one’s hair, weaving it into jewellery as mementoes or keeping locks as material memories. Today, even if we feel more ambivalent about hair, it still elicits strong feelings and so the film explores what we do with an object that only has meaning for a close loved one and around which it is more difficult to weave family stories and histories. With Katie Barclay, Leanne Calvert, Joanne Begiato, Laura Baldock, and Thalia Allington-Wood.
A film made for the Inheriting the Family research network, 2022, by Lily Ford.
inheritingthefamily.org/films/