{"id":456878,"date":"2026-02-04T01:57:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T01:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/456878\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T01:57:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T01:57:12","slug":"inside-michal-marczaks-documentary-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/456878\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Micha\u0142 Marczak\u2019s Documentary Return"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the introduction of the second Sundance<\/a> screening of his new film<\/a> \u201cClosure,<\/a>\u201d director Micha\u0142 Marczak<\/a>, in reaction to an audience question at the film\u2019s premiere, wanted to make sure the audience understood the film they were about to watch was a documentary. \u201cNone of the scenes were staged.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a clarification that turned out to be necessary, as the woman exiting the theater in front of me said to her friend, \u201cThank God he said something, I would\u2019ve sworn that opening was the start of a fiction film.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is, in part, by design. Marczak likes to quote his cinematic hero, and fellow Pole, the late Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski, \u201cfiction films should look like documentaries, and documentaries should look like fiction films.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Gemma<\/a> \"Buddy,<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cClosure<\/a>,\u201d the story of a father\u2019s search for his missing son, is a more straightforward documentary subject and shoot than Marczak\u2019s previous film, \u201cAll These Sleepless Nights<\/a>,\u201d which premiered at Sundance in 2016. That documentary, which weaved through Warsaw nightlife like an early Paul Thomas Anderson film, pointed to a filmmaking talent poised for a future in scripted narrative, as Marczak\u2019s cinema was more electric than 99.9 percent of indie films. And the Polish director and his wife, producer Karolina Marczak, were, in fact, on the road to making a narrative feature, having written a script set on the Vistula River, which they were rafting down on a research trip, when they met Daniel.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne night, we were trying to dock to one of the islands. Our flashlights went out, and it got a little bit dangerous,\u201d said Marczak. \u201cThe banks were really high, and a man, Daniel, appeared from out of nowhere with this flashlight and guided us to safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their savior, a late-40s man travelling alone, welcomed them to join him at his campfire. It was there that he shared the story of why he was on the river: Daniel had been searching for the body of his missing teenage son, Krzysztof, who investigators had reason to believe likely committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into the river.<\/p>\n

In the morning, Marczak helped their new friend with his equipment. The image of Daniel standing in a small boat on the enormous river, scouring below its surface with a camera at the end of a pole, stuck with the filmmaker. When the Marczaks returned home, the plan was to finish the next draft of their script, but \u201cI just couldn\u2019t concentrate because I had him in the back of my mind, and we ended up putting off the fiction film to make this doc,\u201d said Marczak.<\/p>\n

That image of Daniel in the boat would be Marczak\u2019s starting point for a month-long process of testing and prep, to find the language of \u201cClosure.\u201d Nature would\u2019ve played a very different role in Marczak\u2019s planned scripted film \u2014 filled with sun, swimming, and the joy of nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaniel was fighting the river with all his power,\u201d explained Marczak. \u201cSo how do I make the river the antagonist in the movie?\u201d<\/p>\n

The director, who would also serve as a one-man film crew, decided to shoot with wide lenses from inside his subject\u2019s boat (rather than another vessel) to create a sense of being with Daniel, placing us inside his struggle. He also wanted to avoid being handheld, which would add a \u201cfrenetic nervousness,\u201d when Marczak was convinced the film should mirror Daniel\u2019s \u201cmeditative, repetitive search.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"'Closure'Behind the scenes of shooting \u2018Closure\u2019courtesy of filmmaker<\/p>\n

The base of the \u201cClosure\u201d camera and sound rig was a Sony A7 III (the updated version of the small, relatively inexpensive camera employed on \u201cAll These Sleepless Nights\u201d) and an Easyrig. The setup also included a custom prime lens made at Panavision in Poland and a modified DJI LiDAR for focus pulls, all designed so Marczak could shoot by himself for eight hours straight \u2014 and while getting good sound, and with all his equipment either on his person or in his backpack.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all off-the-shelf [gear], but the magic is in the details and how you combine it,\u201d said Marczak. \u201cWe just pushed to the maximum of what that camera can do. We spent an insane amount of time [including during pre-production] in color grades to clean up the image, de-noise it, add more definition, more color, and grain to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before shooting every day, Marczak would listen to William Basinski\u2019s \u201cThe Disintegration Loops\u201d and music from Oscar winning composer Hildur Gu\u00f0nad\u00f3ttir<\/a>\u2019s early collaboration with Die Angel (tracks the \u201cClosure\u201d team was later able to license for the film), which the director said \u201cgives me rhythm and helps me in the operating [the camera] to set my mood and tone.\u201d Marczak has trouble pinpointing it, but that music was intrinsically linked to how he envisioned Daniel\u2019s compositions framed against nature. The combination of music and image spoke to how he understood both his internal and external struggles in the context of his film.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Marczak knew he needed to counter the very close perspective of Daniel with wider shots that provided context for the vast river and the surrounding nature. He wanted, though, to avoid b-roll, and he actively disliked the way drones were used in non-fiction filmmaking.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really don\u2019t like drones, so I had to come up with a way to explain it to myself so it could work,\u201d said Marczak. \u201cThe idea was that the drone would always be a continuation of the action; it would be part of my sequence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the drone footage of Daniel searching could match cut with what was being filmed on the boat and in the river, rather than moving outside the unfolding of dramatic events to establish the world and tone, which was exactly what Marczak hated.<\/p>\n

To accomplish this, Marczak\u2019s wife and producer Karolina tracked him on GPS, driving alongside the river with a drone pilot in her car. When the opportunity arose, the director would call in the drone, quickly take control, and shoot footage of the scene from above. Then, once done, quickly fly the drone back to the operator and quickly switch back to his Easyrig setup. Rather than waste time getting out of the water and the frame, Marczak decided he\u2019d \u201cpaint himself out of shots\u201d with visual effects in post production.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say Marczak\u2019s presence is not felt in the movie, as his deeply personal interactions with Daniel come at key moments in the second half of the film. For the filmmaker, the choice to include those interactions was what felt \u201cthe most genuine to the process of how the film was made.\u201d It would often just be the two of them on the river, with Marczak helping Daniel with the search when he was not filming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would sleep on these islands, we got genuinely close, we have become friends, we\u2019ve helped each other, and there was a strong connection right from the beginning,\u201d said Marczak. \u201cDaniel gave me [a new father] a lot of life advice, and we had a lot of sincere conversations, so at a certain moment I thought, while filming, \u2018You know, maybe I\u2019ll use this.\u2019 And I started to mic myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marczak knows his voice off-screen works against his attempt to make his film feel like a fiction film toward the end, and he acknowledged he could easily have cut it out without missing a narrative beat.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, it is a documentary, I want to make it as cinematic as possible, but then there\u2019s certain things in documentary that I love, as well, that you don\u2019t have in fiction. It\u2019s beautiful, I think, to utilize the tools of everything that cinema has to offer, both fiction and documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cClosure\u201d premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the introduction of the second Sundance screening of his new film \u201cClosure,\u201d director Micha\u0142 Marczak, in reaction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[235338,64,63,18679,134,1689,235339,344,100407],"class_list":{"0":"post-456878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-all-these-sleepless-nights","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-closure","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-michal-marczak","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-sundance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}