Wildstar Sales Boards Tribeca Title ‘The Perfect David,’ from Oh My Gómez (EXCLUSIVE)
U.K.-based Wildstar Sales has acquired world rights to Tribeca world premiere “The Perfect David” (“El Perfecto David”), a probing depiction of the pressures on a high-school bodybuilder to conform to a perfect image of masculinity.
A standout at the 2019’s Ventana Sur, where it was screened in its Copia Final final-cut-stage showcase, “The Perfect David” reps the latest movie from Argentina’s Oh My Gómez!, which broke out to attention with its first movie, Marco Berger’s “Plan B.,” a sales hit at the 2009 inaugural Ventana Sur. Its credits also include “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Ana Katz’s 2021 Sundance World Cinema player and Rotterdam winner.
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“The Perfect David” also marks the feature debut of Argentina’s commercials director Felipe Gómez Aparicio, a multiple Cannes Lions winner who became in one year the world’s 13th most awarded director, according to The Gunn Report, a comprehensive global listing of top advertising talent.
Co-written with Leandro Custo, the key creative decision in “The Perfect David” was to channel its toxic masculinity through a tortuous son-mother relationship. It’s his mother, Juana (Umbra Colombo), a multi-disciplinary artist, who demands that David (newcomer Mauricio di Yorio), 16, gets into perfect shape by his seventeenth birthday, effectively sculpting his body to become her finest artwork.
Spends his waking hours pumping iron at a down-at-heel gym, David grunts as much as he talks. But while bulking up, he’s beginning to come of age, sensing the excitement of friendship and girls, feeling a reciprocated attraction for classmate Mica as he’s driven to steroids to become peak perfect. “As his muscles grow, so does a sexual yearning for freedom and escape, leading to an explosive reckoning,” the synopsis runs.
Gómez Aparicio grew up in a “machismo-soaked, [body-building] sports-obsessed household [where] you either ate, slept, and bled the sport or you were an outsider under your own roof,” he recalled. “Like David, I was without allies, backed into a corner and searching for a voice, a direction, a sense of self.”
“What happens when patriarchy itself begins to crack under the weight of its own dysfunction, when the world around it changes yet it stays immovable, broken?” Aparicio asks.
“‘The Perfect David’ is exquisitely shot, tense and moody with a fantastic score and an outstanding performance from the very handsome Mauricio Di Yorio,” said Murray Dibbs, Wildstar managing director.
Pablo Ingercher and Ramiro Pavón Buenos Aires-based Oh My Gómez! produce “The Perfect David” with Fiona Pittaluga and Martín Cuinat at Uruguay’s Roberto Me Dejó Films. Key Latin American film programmer Hebe Tabachnik, who also has “Valentina” at Cannes, executive produces.
Iván Bein, Bárbara Sarasola-Day, Federico Eibuszyc, Pasto Floreado, Marina Rodríguez-Nazar serve as associate producers. Federico Moreira (La Mayor) and Nicolás Pérez Veiga (Primo) co-produce.
Credits: Adolpho Veloso
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