Costuras
2010 · 13m · España
Directed by Iván Tomás
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Lionel's true passion is sewing, and he carries it too far for others to understand; to recover his precious gift he is forced on a desperate journey inside his own head.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A passion for *sewing* as the vehicle for surrealist self-discovery feels deliberately perverse in the best way—most films would pick something grandiose, but Tomás commits fully to the absurdity and wins.
The film's structural descent into interior landscape recalls a lineage of introspective European cinema, particularly in how it uses material craft as a formal language rather than mere metaphor.
That central conceit—threading the needle between literal needlework and psychological unraveling—lives or dies on commitment to the textile imagery, and Tomás's decision to make the surrealism emerge *from* the sewing itself, not despite it, is what makes this work on a shoestring.