SUTURE

*Winner, Best Experimental Film, 2022 Toronto Independent Film Festival*

*Winner, Best Experimental Film, 2023 Veracruz Itinerant Short Film Festival*

Two women, otherwise separate, are bound by a desire for a new face, a new body, a new self. After scrutinizing themselves in mirrors and consulting the internet, each undertakes a process of transfiguration via costume pieces that resemble surgically modified bodies, ultimately arriving at a new state of being both more anonymous and sublime.

Prompted by an ongoing fascination with the global proliferation of cosmetic surgery, filmmaker and costume designer Snežana Pešić delves into the realm of self-actualization through corporeal transformation with Suture. To a soundtrack of ambient music, both eerie and tranquilizing, and shards of individual testimonies that emerge and recede like phantom radio transmissions, Suture’s parallel protagonists drift through a dreamlike domestic space, assuming a variety of costumes whose materials and construction closely resemble those of actual surgical procedures. Rendered with playful curiosity and devoid of judgement, Suture investigates the longing for a new external self to mirror an ideal inner self, arriving at a conclusion that is equal parts troubling and transcendent.

Directed and designed by Snežana Pešić

Photographed by Alysha Galbreath

Soundscape by Applied Silence

Cast: Olivia Tilley, Eryn Brobyn