They Called Me David
2021 · 6m · United Kingdom
Directed by Lindsay Hallam
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
David was created in a lab, a strange being of immense power — but they are also just a lonely child, searching for their father.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's sci-fi window dressing on a fundamentally sentimental core—the lab-created godling searching for daddy is exactly the kind of indie-darling premise that sounds subversive until you realize it's just playing dress-up with familiar emotional beats.
Hallam positions this squarely in the lineage of contemporary fantasy-realism—think recent festival darlings that splice the mythic with the domestic—and executes with genuine formal control, though the premise itself doesn't quite crack open anything new within that tradition.
The decision to render David's immense power entirely through stillness and negative space—what we *don't* see him do—is the move that makes this work; a smaller film would've defaulted to spectacle, but Hallam commits to restraint and lets that absence become the whole emotional architecture.