Perfect

Synchronised swimming is for girls. It’s for girls who can run a 400 metre sprint while holding their breath, and smiling. Perfect is a documentary feature that dives beyond the sequins and mascara to follow the Canadian synchronised swimming team through the most gruelling year of their lives as they battle for a spot at Rio 2016. This team of elite athletes will do whatever it takes to make it. They’ll suffer concussions, smashed vertebrae, fractured feet, broken noses, black eyes and dislocated knees. That’s because synchronised swimming is as much of a contact sport as football.“You go out there, you kill. This is war,” trainer Meng Chen tells her girls before they compete. The biggest challenge for Team Canada is not their choreography nor their synchronicity, but their diversity. In a conservative sport like synchronised swimming, the definition of perfection is sameness. But Team Canada representsthe country’s cultural diversity, which makes them the underdogs. The only way they’ll have a chance at their Olympic dream is to out swim and outperform the competition with a routine that totally blows the judges out of the water.With unprecedented access to the team and their trainer, Perfect follows this determined, strong and hard working group of women in their quest to make it to the Olympics. From Montreal to Bratislava, Kazan and Puerto Rico, battling eating disorders, dislocated knees and crushing losses, these girls never give up. And more importantly, they never stop smiling.