Nine years after “All These Sleepless Nights” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim and picked up the directing prize in the World Cinema – Documentary category, Polish director Michał Marczak is gearing up to make “Closure.” The project, selected as part of the Pitching Forum at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’s industry section, Agora, follows a father as he scours the depths of Poland’s Vistula River in search of his missing teenage son.
Speaking with Variety out of Thessaloniki, Marczak says the project came to him as a “complete coincidence” as he was location scouting for a fiction feature film he was planning to shoot by the Vistula. It was there that he first spotted Daniel, the film’s main subject, as he navigated the river with a highly-technological boat, a sonar, and a drone.
“We were wondering: what in the world is this man doing? Is he a treasure hunter? Then we sat by the fire at night and he told us the whole story and we ended up helping him,” adds the director. “That day, he found a skull, and it turned out to be a six-year-old skull. Seeing the emotions on his face, the skull on his hands, it felt like an epic Greek tragedy that rarely comes by. I felt this story was so powerful that it needed a long format movie to give it justice.”
After meeting Daniel by the Vistula on that fateful afternoon, Marczak and his crew joined the grieving father in his search. Of the challenges that might come with capturing a family’s emotional turmoil up close, the director says Daniel and his family are “used to a certain media attention” after the case became huge in Poland.
“It was all about building that close relationship,” he adds. “I wasn’t sure if I could propose this film, I just took it day by day to see how our relationship would build and it happened quite fast. We realized we could make something meaningful. I am so grateful to them for giving me that trust.”
When asked about the almost decade-long gap between the success of “All These Sleepless Nights” and “Closure,” the director recalls working “non-stop” in the industry since the age of 16 and wanting to “take a step back” after the busy run with his doc. “I was just tired and wanted to learn how to write. I dedicated five years to writing and began writing fiction films. It was a hard journey in the beginning, but I started to get the hang of it and now have four different fiction films in different stages of development.”
Marczak is still fairly secretive about his upcoming fiction projects but revealed one is a U.S. co-production, while the other four are European ventures. The one thing they all have in common? Marczak as a writer and director.
“The industry is really hard and, although I was a very established documentary filmmaker, I had to start from scratch with fiction,” he continues. “I didn’t think it was going to be that difficult to get into that world. I did music videos and commercials, I worked with people like Thom Yorke, and that helped me learn the ropes of working with bigger crews. Now that I have the hang of it, I want to see what comes out of it.”
Courtesy of Michał Marczak
Another factor in Marczak waiting almost 10 years between projects is how long it took to finance “All These Sleepless Nights,” an experience he still recalls with great frustration. “It took a horrendous amount of time to put the budget together for ‘All These Sleepless Nights.’ It really makes someone not want to make a movie for a long time afterwards,” he says.
“If you think about it, they are not putting big amounts in documentaries and there are so many strings attached,” he continues. “It makes the process so tedious. I think we should work together to make it easier, especially considering that docs are really time sensitive and sometimes something is happening emotionally that you have to act fast on. If the process is stretched over so many years, it can make movies worse.”
The director believes the burden of bureaucracy also stands in the way of more successful European co-productions, saying that you have “to do so much” and “jump through so many hoops” for amounts that aren’t always that big. “You might get 100,000 euros and then have to spend all of it on actual production costs in the co-producing country like flying the crew and living there while you shoot. This takes so much of the budget and requires so much time. In a perfect world, I would love for financiers, co-producers and funds to come together and simplify this process.”
“Closure” is produced by Monika Braid of Braidmade Films, co-produced by Gregor Streiber of Inselfilm Produktion, and executive produced by Karolina Marczak.
