Stitch Up Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Director's Statement

• More details about Bec Bignell

  Bec Bignell

  STITCH UP emerged from the absurd, lived reality of attempting to sustain a filmmaking career while navigating early motherhood. After many years in the industry, just as my career felt poised to accelerate, the arrival of a newborn made that forward momentum feel abruptly reversed. With less time than ever, an onslaught of raw emotion, and an identity shift I struggled to articulate, trying to reconcile motherhood with creative ambition within a patriarchal system felt fundamentally untenable. Making this film gave me a way to process my career rupture, and it was deliciously empowering to channel my frustration into the very medium that now felt out of reach. The loneliness and isolation I experienced during this time was eased by reconnecting with a friend and fellow creative at a school reunion. Like me, co-writer Laura Maitland was grappling with how to hold both maternal life and the wild aspirations we had cultivated long before children. Our serendipitous reconnection sparked the idea to capture our shared tensions in film, where we could tell our story and dive back into the craft we love. For both of us, developing STITCH UP has been one of the most creatively fulfilling and efficient processes of our careers. Making the film alongside the demands of being primary carers restored a sense of possibility, showing us that navigating work and home does not need to compromise filmmaking ambition. We refused to let parenthood diminish our vision, aiming instead to stretch our craft and be unapologetically original. In a world saturated with screen stories ‘optimised for social media’, the intent to hold back dialogue until the keynote finale is our way of honouring the elements of cinema that make film unmistakably its own. Knowing that the story would also require prosthetics and blood work was daunting, especially given the micro-budget and my limited prior experience with prosthetics. The prosthetic work, production design, sound, and visual style reflect specific creative intent that was imagined into life by incredible collaborators who made tangible what I had been visualising while breastfeeding, pumping, and changing nappies. The cast, crew, and wider community who helped bring STITCH UP to life affirm that meaningful work is collective, and that collaboration is essential in helping carers stay in the game. In STITCH UP, we wanted to have fun exploring motherhood without prescribing what is “right” or “wrong” in a culture overflowing with self-appointed experts. Centring on Maia, a ‘thought leader’ and ‘self-care expert’, allowed us to playfully examine our obsession with people paid to tell us how to live our lives...even when they don’t practice what they preach. Maia loves her work and loves being a mother, yet she constantly struggles in a society that expects women to manage everything seamlessly. As she prepares for an important keynote, a cascade of escalating obstacles exposes the invisible labour she carries, and the emotional contortions demanded of women trying to hold it all together. The world around Maia compresses, distorts, and intrudes, embodying the relentless pressures placed upon her. The film is an ironic, absurdist portrait of a woman suspended between the two realms she's expected to master - professional success and domestic responsibility. Absurdism allows the story to move beyond naturalism into the heightened, raw truth of women’s lived experience. The recurring thumb motif is central to the film’s exploration of agency. The loss of Maia’s first thumb is accidental, a violent interruption caused by external demands. But the second severance is deliberate, a decisive act of self-determination when Maia stops trying to separate her identities and instead embraces the unruly, fused reality of her life. This is not an act of harm, but one of reclamation, a refusal to conceal the strain she’s tried to hide. STITCH UP also speaks to the many creatives and artists, who push towards burnout not out of martyrdom, but because they passionately love their work. It challenges the idea that ambition and caregiving are at odds, instead celebrating the autonomy women fight to reclaim within the confines of a society that was never designed with them in mind. Visually, the film embraces rich, captivating colour, explicit choreography, and precise rhythmic editing to translate emotional labour into physical spectacle. The tone is bent, funny, sharply timed, shocking, and delightfully odd. With minimal dialogue, it trusts performance, movement, camera work, symbolism and sound to carry emotional truth. At its core, STITCH UP is a celebration of resilience, a critique of impossible expectations, and an invitation to recognise the complexity and courage of women who refuse to shrink themselves to meet the world’s limitations.