"I Always Do My Collars First" is a documentary that delivers artful and unexpectedly entertaining look at what's often ignored as a mundane chore. It's a film about ironing, but it's 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 act 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; it's performed with complex aesthetic sensibilities that connect these women to other women in their community. 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 film's end, we see that for them, and their mothers, ironing has been as necessary to self respect as cooking is to eating. (24 minutes, 2009)

DVD special features include: "The Collared Contest" (4 minutes), "The Pleat Debate" (2 minutes), "The Tom Jones Handkerchief (1 minute), "The Well Groomed Woman" (14 minutes).