Our planet’s economic and environmental future hangs on an unlikely thread: the clothesline.

British filmmaker Steven Lake criss-crosses the world to unravel the reasons and consequences for the banishing of the clotheslines in favour of tumble dryers.

Corporate America sold us an electric dream: replacing simple centuries-old outdoors line-drying with the electricity hungry dryer, increasing the demand for dirty coal energy across the globe. Now, developing nations are starting their own love affair with an electric utopia exponentially increasing the demands on an already threatened environment.

From the laundry-less gardens of sunny California to India’s communal open air Laundromats, DRYING FOR FREEDOM is a voyage into the new environmental battlefield where money, status and class come first and our planet is a poor second.