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Poster for Hot Irons
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Released
1999 · FILM

Hot Irons

Directed by
Runtime
50 min
Documentary

Synopsis

In Detroit, hair styling isn't just a matter of personal grooming, it's a way of life, and Andrew Dosunmu's documentary Hot Irons offers an inside glimpse at Motor City hair salons that turn the tresses of their African-American clientele into remarkable works of art. Dosunmu takes his cameras to Detroit's annual ""Hair Wars"" competition, in which stylists compete to see who can create the wildest and most outrageous hairdo. Offering a stark contrast between the unique aesthetic of the stylists and the grinding poverty of inner city Detroit, which never fully recovered from the 1968 riots, Hot Irons shows how events like ""Hair Wars"" brings a sense of art and purpose to a community where both are often lacking.

Credits

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 6

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Noah HerzogShot by Karl Kuhn

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