Sew Torn, the debut feature from remarkably assured 24-year-old director Freddy MacDonald, follows a seamstress named Barbara (Eve Connolly), who gets tangled up in a drug deal gone awry.
When you hear about a seamstress in a thriller, maybe you assume she has a talent for sewing up wounds. But Sew Torn is far more creative than that, as the exclusive scene above illustrates. Just watch it and we promise you won’t be disappointed.
The scene is very similar to the 2019 short film that predated Sew Torn, which was also called “Sew Torn.” (MovieMaker‘s house style is to italicize feature titles and put the names of short films in quotes.) MacDonald made the short film while a teenager, and it helped him become the youngest Directing Fellow ever accepted to the AFI Conservatory. It was acquired by Searchlight Pictures and received an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release nationwide alongside Ready Or Not.
His AFI thesis film, “Shedding Angels,” won a Student Academy Award and was shortlisted for a student BAFTA. MacDonald also directed four music videos for three-time Grammy winner Fantastic Negrito and three viral documentaries following hardware hacker Joe Grand. He is represented by UTA.
Freddy MacDonald on Making Sew Torn as a Feature and Short
Freddy MacDonald wrote and co-produced the film with his father, Fred MacDonald, a writer, producer, and founder of several entertainment and media companies who has worked with The Walt Disney Company, DreamWorks Animation, Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment, and Viacom, among others. It was inspired in part by Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, and eventually caught the attention of Joel Cohn.
The iconic director met with Freddy MacDonald for coffee, to share some DIY filmmaking advice.
“From the very beginning, we took Joel Coen’s advice and went the friends and family route,” Freddy MacDonald explains in the film’s press materials. “This allowed us to maintain full creative control, but it wasn’t without its own set of issues. Because this was our first film, we had no track record… investors could only watch the ‘Sew Torn’ short film and hope that we could pull off something much larger. “
The MacDonalds connected with the Houston producers Socratis and Diamantis Zavitsanos, who recruited investors including Daryl Morey, president of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. They also brought in former NFL player Ronnie Lott. The feature premiered to a strong response at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2024.
While the “Sew Torn” short depicted the perfect crime seen in the clip above, the feature film expands the universe of mobile seamstress Barbara by portraying three possible scenarios that could spin out from her decision to intervene in the botched drug deal as she drives home to collect a button for a demanding bride.
In the second scenario, instead of committing the perfect crime with thread, she calls the police. In the third, she drives away and pretends she never saw the crime.
“”We get to explore the repercussions of her actions through this three-story-format, and ultimately build to an even greater cinematic resolve,” Freddy MacDonald said.
Fred MacDonald said it took some trial and error to arrive at the expanded approach of the feature.
“After a false start with a more typical narrative that felt rather contrived, the new Sew Torn script came about rather quickly. I remember Freddy and I going for a walk and talking about how the short film only showed Barbara making one choice – to commit the ‘Perfect Crime,’ but that there were two other choices we could leverage that would be equally as interesting,” he explains in the press materials.
“’Call Police’ and ‘Drive Away’ immediately opened the broader story for us and we became very excited about showing all three choices back to back.”
Sew Torn arrives in theaters Friday, from Sunrise Films.
Main image: Eve Connolly in Sew Torn. Sunrise Films.