Dad says hello to Los Angeles: A Swiss-American filmmaker sends a brave seamstress through Sarganserland

Life is short, full of twists and turns. And sometimes you look back on fateful moments and wonder what would have become of you if you had made different decisions back then.

The young seamstress Barbara finds herself in such a situation when she accidentally stumbles upon the bloody scene of a failed drug deal in her sky-blue old Fiat Cinquecento on a godforsaken country road in the Tamina Valley: On the asphalt lie two seriously injured motorcyclists, two pistols – and a suitcase that smells of a lot of money.

Barbara (Eve Connolly) sees three options: solving her acute financial worries with the perfect crime, calling the police, or driving on empty. The neo-film noir "Sew Torn" explores these options in three bizarre yet refined chapters. The protagonist, who fights to save her recently deceased mother's sewing studio in a mountain village and combats loneliness, develops superpowers with her threads. She reveals herself as a feminine hybrid of Cinderella, a brave little tailor, and Spider-Man.

Responsible for the American-Swiss co-production—a rare collaboration—is 24-year-old dual citizen Freddy Macdonald. The grandson of a Swiss father, he grew up in Los Angeles, and when the family temporarily relocated to Zurich for work, he completed his secondary school education at the Swiss International School in Adliswil.

The young director said this last year at the Locarno Film Festival, where "Sew Torn" was shown late at night on the Piazza Grande. In conversation, he came across as a proper schoolboy, blurting out phrases like "The whole thing is so exciting!" or "I have to check this" when he wasn't quite sure about an answer. And the performance in front of thousands of people on the Piazza had, by his own admission, left him with barely any sleep for weeks beforehand.

But inside this almost overly correct young man, who has already been called a child prodigy, lies a real devil. His father, Fred, a former head of an animation studio, not only passed on his first name to him, but also his love of filmmaking, teaching him stop-motion techniques as a young child. The two co-wrote the "Sew Torn" screenplay, based on a short film with which their son applied for admission to the American Film Institute in 2019. He was accepted, as he notes, at the youngest age ever to have entered the directing profession.

Peter Spears ("Nomadland") joined as producer of this short film, which opened the door to theatrical distribution by the renowned Searchlight Pictures ("Poor Things"). This, in turn, brought the work to the attention of Joel Coen, whose "No Country for Old Men" was clearly a source of inspiration for the material. He met Freddy for coffee, as he tells it, and encouraged him to develop the whole thing into a full-fledged feature film. Father and son implemented this plan, with painstaking writing and dozens of attempts.

The director, who wanted to be a roller coaster engineer as a child, takes the audience on a ride of his own: At times, the cuts—he edited the film himself—are clip-like, fast, at the pace of sewing machines that rattle intermittently. Influences from David Lynch to Quentin Tarantino shine through, and the basic idea is reminiscent of Tom Tykwer's box office hit "Run Lola Run" (1998). But Macdonald is well on his way to developing his own style, creating memorable images with Swiss cinematographer Sebastian Klinger.

This is probably one of the reasons why a trailer in which Barbara finds a solution to her serious problem with needle, thread, brains, and motor power has garnered 37 million views on social media. The filmmaker points this out with pride, admitting that he naturally hopes for a large audience in front of the screen. But the crucial thing is that his work is recognized, however it may be.

The setting of the plot in Switzerland may seem a bit contrived, especially since English is spoken, but the director's enthusiasm for his second home seems genuine: Here, he claims, he experienced a great passion for filmmaking, more than in Los Angeles with its "millions of cameras." In the village of Vättis, with its 400 inhabitants in Sarganserland, where he shot large parts of the feature film after the short film, the response was enormous: "The people opened their doors to us, gave us gifts and free beer."

Now the film, which was almost entirely privately financed and whose sponsors included the long-established Toggenburg sewing machine factory Bernina, is playing in Swiss cinemas after a theatrical release in America and Great Britain. But the screening on the Piazza Grande will remain one of the formative experiences of his life, Macdonald says today; this reference could also be quite helpful in launching his next work: He has just finished writing a psychological thriller and plans to film a large part of it in Switzerland again. He is keeping the rest secret for the time being.

“Sew Torn”: in cinemas.