Gripping ‘Closure’ Follows A Father On A Quest To Find His Missing Son – Sundance Film Festival

EXCLUSIVE: A father embarks on a desperate search for his missing teenage son in the gripping documentary Closurepremiering today at the Sundance Film Festival.

Polish filmmaker Michał Marczak writes and directs the feature, which screens in World Cinema Documentary Competition. The film is produced by Monika Braid, Katarzyna Szczerba, two-time Oscar nominee Rémi Grellety (Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, I Am Not Your Negro), and Karolina Marczak. We have your first look at the film in the clip below.

“Daniel didn’t hear his 16-year-old son, Chris, slip out of the house that early morning,” reads a synopsis. “He didn’t know what pulled him onto a bridge over the boisterous Vistula River in Warsaw – only that it was the last place he was seen. A rotating CCTV camera captured him there, and then, between turns, he vanished, leaving two possibilities: that he plunged into the river, or made it off the bridge unseen. Since that moment, Daniel and his wife, Agnieszka, have lived suspended between desperate hope and paralyzing fear.”

The synopsis continues, “Unable to wait passively for an unlikely breakthrough in the police investigation, Daniel builds a custom boat outfitted with cameras and drones, determined to probe the river’s murky depths himself. This marks the beginning of an all-consuming search.”

In a director’s statement, Marczak explained the origins of the documentary.

“I was scouting locations on the Vistula River, south of Warsaw, for a fiction feature comedy-drama I had written with my wife, Karolina,” he writes. “We were sailing with our six-year-old son, and at that time I kept returning to thoughts about parenthood and the invisible pressures reaching children earlier and earlier, and the helplessness of trying to protect them from things you can’t always name.

“One evening, we were sailing after dark, trying to dock at one of the river’s islands along this extraordinarily beautiful, untamed stretch of the Vistula. Struggling to find our way, we were suddenly joined by a man who emerged from the darkness and guided us safely to shore.

“That man was Daniel, who was to become the protagonist of Closure. The following day, he told us why he was there, how, for months now, he had been searching the water for his missing teenage son, Chris. Listening to him, and witnessing the sheer effort he was putting into the search, I was profoundly moved.

“A week later, I called Daniel and asked if I could join him on his search.”

As the Sundance program notes, the search would expand from the physical environs of the Vistula “into the digital world, when [Daniel] begins to chart the darkened halls of his son’s online footprint in an effort to understand how systems of connectivity can lead a generation to the abyss of isolation.”

Michał Marczak credits include 2011’s At the Edge of Russiawhich earned him the Emerging Artist Award at Hot Docs in Toronto. His 2016 film All These Sleepless Nights won numerous awards, including the directing prize in World Cinema Documentary at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

In addition to today’s world premiere, Closure screens in Park City on Saturday, and on Thursday, Jan. 29. It screens in Salt Lake City on Monday, Jan. 26.

Closure’s executive producers include Danielle DiGiacomo, Brian Levy, Julia Nelson, Christine D’Souza, Amy Shepherd, Danielle Turkov, James Costa, Trevor Burgess, and Gary Hess. The film was edited by Anna Garncarczyk. Five composers are credited for the score: Pawel Mykietyn, Dirk Dresselhaus, Ilpo Väisänen, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and William Basinski.

In the clip below, Daniel continues his search for his son. In a watery expanse, he spots what could his boy’s body.