Stitches

Taylor Olson

Taylor Olson (he/they) is a queer former athlete-turned filmmaker living with invisible disabilities. The Canadian Screen Award nominee’s feature film directorial debut Bone Cage was released to critical acclaim; sweeping the awards at the FIN Atlantic International Film Festival and earning over 30 additional accolades at festivals around the globe. Bone Cage appeared in competition at Camerimage, competed in the Forward Future section of the Beijing International Film Festival, and toured numerous US festivals before being nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards for Adapted Screenplay & Supporting Actress. Olson premiered his sophomore feature film Look At Me at the Slamdance Film Festival 2024. He won Best Performance at the Canadian Film Fest and was nominated for Performer in a Leading Role, Comedy at the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards. His third feature film What We Dreamed of Then won Best Dramatic Feature at Cinequest Film Festival and had a successful theatrical release through Vortex before landing on Crave. For television, Olson was nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards for their show Hey Halifax, Hello! Today! for Best Sketch Show & Ensemble Performance, as well as Best Direction, Variety or Sketch Comedy. Olson also has directed six episodes of This Hour Has 22 Minutes on CBC, three seasons of the documentary series Disrupt for AMI, a 6 x half hour season of television for TPB+, and four seasons of short-form television.

Director Statement

Stitches is a psychological body horror anthology about the violence we do to ourselves in the name of healing, the distressing hunger human’s have to watch others suffer, and how this is being amplified during our era of AI. Each segment reflects a part of my own history: disordered eating, shame, performance, and trauma. I wanted to take these intimate, often invisible struggles and stretch them into something tactile, grotesque, and cinematic. It asks why we keep filming pain. Why we share it. Why we need to see it again. And whether or not it all feels less real in the AI era.
At its core, Stitches is also about our appetite for the ‚fucked up‘. About how we stop and watch, how we click play, how we tell ourselves we’re learning something – even as we’re complicit in someone else’s suffering. Each man in this film is trying to heal. But the process becomes a performance, and the performance becomes a prison. And we keep watching.
This is my first horror film and first time embodying multiple roles within a single film. It was important that each character felt distinct and fully lived-in, but also connected – as if they were fractured reflections of the same person trying, and failing, to hold themselves together. Because in some way, they are.