‘Closure’ Wins Golden Alexander At Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival; ‘Birds Of War’ Earns 4 Awards
ClosureMichal Marczak’s searing account of a man desperately searching for his missing teenage son, won the Golden Alexander in International Competition today at the prestigious Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece. It’s the festival’s top honor.
Marczak’s film, which premiered in World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance, follows a man named Daniel whose son Chris is last seen on a bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw. A rotating CCTV camera recorded images of the young man on the bridge, but after the camera cycled back to the spot, Chris was gone.
Marczak attended the Thessaloniki awards ceremony, held on a pier in the port city along the Aegean Sea.
‘Closure’
Sundance Institute
“I’m very moved, super moved,” Marczak told Deadline after winning the prize. “We were actually here in Thessaloniki presenting the project for the first time last year at the Forum. And at the Forum we met Rémi Grellety, one of our producers. So, it really helped to shape the project and get it done. And we met the folks from Sundance here as well, which gave us a big boost of confidence as well as all the people from Thessaloniki to try to get it done for this year.”
Closure will serve as the opening night film at the upcoming Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival in Marczak’s native Poland.
“We did this movie in 14 months from the moment we met the protagonist and we shot for a year,” the director explained. “We were super-fast editing as we went, just really trying to stretch our resources and to get this movie out.”
The question that hangs over the film is whether Chris took his own life. His father spends month after month searching the Vistula for his son’s body.
“When you see people that are genuinely moved by the movie, that’s beautiful,” Marczak told us. “And I received this one voice message from a person and he said, ‘Listen, I’ve had some bad days. I’ve had really deep, dark thoughts. But after I saw your movie, I know that I’m never, ever going to commit suicide.’ And I cried when I heard that message.”
At the TiDF awards ceremony, Birds of War won a remarkable four prizes, including the Silver Alexander in International Competition. The film is directed by Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, a married couple who constructed the documentary from many terabytes of footage shot by Habak in his native Syria during the country’s long and brutal civil war. The conflict, which drove millions out of Syria creating a refugee crisis in Europe, ended over a year ago when Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Moscow.
Director Abd Alkader Habak holds several of the awards his film ‘Birds of War’ won at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece.
Matthew Carey
“It is really important for me,” Habak told Deadline about the Thessaloniki recognition, “especially at this moment with another war going on in our region. It’s a circle of life, it’s a circle of war. That is how our region has been [impacted] for the past more than 50 years. And that is really scary because when a war ends, you’re going to feel and think, ‘Now we’re going to live in peace.’ And [then] another war starts after a few years. It’s not fair for the people. The people who pay this price, it’s the civilians.”
He added, “The film has a lot of my archive, which is the archive I have shot in Aleppo, under the siege of Aleppo. And showing a part of me, a part of what I lived through, a part of what I was doing when I was working there.”
‘Birds of War’
Habak Films
Habak said he hopes Syria won’t be drawn into the widening conflict that began two weeks ago when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran. Israel is also bombarding Lebanon, which harbors elements of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Iran has been firing weapons at Gulf countries, and its proxies have staged attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq.
“The new government, [in Syria]they are trying to stay out of the new war that is happening in the Middle East, but I don’t know if they’re going to be successful,” he told Deadline. “Fifteen years of war, Assad destroyed our country, destroyed our community, destroyed our society. He actually created a huge gap between the community and society. And people are trying to rebuild that at the moment. If we go back to another war, we’re going to be more destroyed. I hope just to live in peace.”
MORE to come on the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival awards…
