Grant Sergot Milliner: Original Hatmaking
Grant Sergot runs a hat shop in Bisbee, Arizona, using equipment that in some cases is nearly a hundred years old. The film follows his process step by step: steaming and blocking felt over wooden forms, shaping brims by hand, and running machines that have no modern equivalent left in production. Sergot talks through why he keeps the old tools rather than replacing them, and what gets lost when a trade moves to mass manufacturing. The camera lingers on the mechanics of the century-old presses and blocks, the kind of detail that explains why a handmade hat costs what it does and takes as long as it does. There's no narrator pushing an argument here, just a craftsman explaining his own work in his own shop, and the quiet case that a skill like this survives only because someone is still willing to do it by hand.