The Story

The making of Perfect Present is the story of an unusual film genesis: four actors and a director locked themselves up for weekly improvisational sessions without a preconceived script or storyline, allowing the narrative to unfold as each actor built his own backstory, often unbeknown to the others. Thus, the story developed organically and turned into a powerful convoluted narrative of misguided love and betrayal.

An awkward reunion dinner between three flawed brothers who all have a hidden agenda descends into chaos when the woman they all love announces her pregnancy without revealing the father’s identity.

The flawed pretentious characters were enlarged to the point where they became too big for their own footprints and started to topple over. Stubborn conceit and blind pretense created hilarious dialogue that kept the heavy story afloat while a plot emerged, twisting and turning. Months of improvising were followed by an equally intense period of editing and polishing, and the result is Perfect Present: a dark comedy with a tarnished silver lining, a movie with a heart, a film like no other.

Perfect Present is a heady cocktail of unrequited love, sibling rivalry, adultery and a dash of lies, big and small, that swirls together to become a bitter-sweet toxic potion that three estranged brothers - and the single most important woman in all their lives - are forced to consume in one sitting during an epic family reunion dinner gone astray.

Silverware clashes, pretentious wine is spilled and dreams and dinner plates are shattered alike as the three brothers are forced to confront their mistakes of the past. But when the deepest of all family secrets slowly unravels, they are forced to reconsider a radically different future as well - with or without each other.