The Perfect David

Best Feature Film

At sixteen, David is much like any teenager, but his boyish good looks rest upon a hulking, muscular body. His weightlifting obsession is driven by his mother Juana, a troubled artist whose only goal is to have her son reach physical perfection by his seventeenth birthday. With countless hours spent at a grungy gym in the company of a motley clique of pumped-up gym rats, David desperately searches for what it means to be a man. With his birthday approaching, Juana demands growth at any cost. Soon David’s cohorts offer him dangerous chemical shortcuts, sending the teen spiraling into a cycle of physical and emotional torment. Pushed in every direction by adults who only take and trapped inside a body that is growing to freakish proportions, David rages against this brutally imposed armor. And his only way out is to stop being perfect.