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1-2 Special has acquired U.S. rights to Michał Marczak’s documentary “Closure,” which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The distributor will release the film in theaters on Oct. 28.
The film follows
Daniel Dymiński, a father on a mission to locate his son, Chris, who was last seen by surveillance cameras walking on Warsaw’s Gdańsk Bridge. Armed with an arsenal of tools – from DIY inventions to GPS trackers to drones – Daniel scours the turbulent Vistula River on an all-consuming search, desperate for answers. As time passes, the Dymiński family must reckon with their loss and the possibility that they may never understand what really happened, yet Daniel refuses to quit trying, clinging to the hope that his son might still be alive.
The film received widespread critical praise following its premiere. Variety’s Murtada Elfadl described the “spellbinding” film as a “devastating study of love and loss,” noting that it “plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.” Rolling Stone named it one of the top films of Sundance and hailed Marczak as “one of the best, most expressionistic nonfiction filmmakers working today.” IndieWire similarly named it as one of the best films from this year’s festival, calling it “a visceral film that defies the true-crime genre” and “an ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both,” while RogerEbert.com said “Closure” was “such a gorgeously shot film that one could mistake it for fiction.”
After Sundance, the film played festivals around the world, including True/False, DC/DOX, Sheffield DocFest, Doc10 in Chicago, AFS Doc Days, Millennium Docs Against Gravity — where it was awarded best cinematography, the Silesian Audience Award, and the Arthouse Cinema Association Award — and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, where it won the top Golden Alexander prize, making it eligible for consideration in the documentary feature category of the Academy Awards.
This is Marczak’s fourth feature film, and comes 10 years after “All These Sleepless Nights,” which won the best director prize in the World Cinema – Documentary section at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Marczak said: “ ‘Closure’ was made for the big screen, so I’m thrilled that thanks to 1-2 Special audiences will experience it that way. One of the greatest surprises of making this film was discovering how one family’s deeply personal story could bring so many people together. There is something profoundly moving about experiencing that connection in a room full of strangers. That is something only a movie theater can still do.”
“Closure” was produced by Monika Braid, two-time Oscar-nominee Rémi Grellety (“I Am Not Your Negro,” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”), Marczak, Katarzyna Szczerba and Karolina Marczak, and co-produced by Sara Skrodzka.
The film is a production of Braidmade Films, in co-production with Warboys Films, co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, in association with Think-Film Impact Production, and with the participation of Bird Street Productions. Other partners include Canal + Polska, National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, Mazovia Warsaw Film Fund, France Télévisions, Procirep Angoa and Great Hill.
Executive producers are Danielle Turkov Wilson, Amy Shepherd, Tamar Guttmann, Clifford Wilson, James Costa, Trevor Burgess, Gary Hess, Melony and Adam Lewis, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Julia Nelson, Christine D’Souza, Danielle DiGiacomo and Brian Levy, with Zachary Zuckerman as co-executive producer and Barker Carlock as contributing producer.
The deal was negotiated by Julia Nelson on behalf of the filmmakers with 1-2 Special.
