In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with award-winning filmmaker Michał Marczak about Closure, his haunting documentary about Daniel, a father who combs Warsaw’s Vistula River alone in search of his vanished teenage son, Chris. Michał recalls how a chance nighttime meeting on a river island led him to shelve a fiction project. Sensationalist TV coverage of the family then made him determined to tell their story with more care. He describes the Polish documentary tradition that shaped his cinematic style and the lightweight, self-engineered camera rig that let him work without a crew. Like Daniel, he did on his own what normally takes several people. He also reflects on how losing his own father as a boy resurfaced during filming, creating a bond in which he and Daniel helped each other face long-deferred grief. Michał explains Daniel’s inventive search methods, from GPS-tracked dummies to an old trick with bread and candles. He also describes how Daniel has become a lifeline for other families with missing loved ones. We close with the film’s impact campaign. Shaped by suicide-prevention experts, it confronts the romanticizing of death on social media and shows young audiences how deeply one life matters to everyone around them.
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen on this Substack or Ted’s Hope for Film
Vanessa Hope: I’m extremely excited to speak with award-winning filmmaker Michał Marczak about his new film, Closure. Closure premiered at Sundance, and that’s where Ted and I saw it. It’s incredible. It won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. It follows Daniel, a father who searches Warsaw’s Vistula River for his missing teenage son, caught between dread and hope.
Before that, Michał won the Best Director Award at Sundance for All These Sleepless Nights, which Ted raves about. IndieWire named it one of the best films of the decade. He also made the cult documentary Fuck for Forest, which premiered in competition at SXSW. Michał has directed music videos for Radiohead and Thom Yorke, studied film at CalArts, and has two fiction features in pre-production. It’s so nice to meet you, Michał.
Michał Marczak: So nice to meet you. Yeah. And thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much to you and Ted for the support. It means so much.
Vanessa: Of course. And thank you for finding such a cool location. You should tell us where you are, because it’s a very groovy spot.
Michał: This is the Dolby Atmos theater slash mixing stage, which belongs to Sandbox Films. I was very privileged to be invited to their Camp Sandbox, where they invite documentary filmmakers and scientists to do, a brainstorm on potential film ideas. I’ve always been a science nerd, so this is an insane institution. It’s part of the Simons Foundation. I’m so grateful to be a part of this.
Vanessa: Yeah, it looks great. So you’re in New York City, and you’ve been traveling nonstop with this film. Again, thank you for joining.
Michał: Thank you.
Vanessa: You were on the Vistula River scouting locations on a fiction film when Daniel came into your life. What happened in that first encounter that made you decide to put your fiction film aside and join him on the river?
Michał: It’s weird how sometimes, you know, this cosmos makes you do, or the stars align, and it makes you completely change your plans. We met Daniel completely by accident. It was the last day of our scout, we were going home, and it was night. We were trying to dock at this island, and he helped us carry our stuff. We didn’t even know anybody was on there. It’s thanks to him that we kind of docked safely. And we had our six-year-old son at the time there with us as well, and my wife.
And then, you know, we sat by the fire at night, and he told us why he’s there, and that he’s searching for his son, and that he had no clue what had happened to him, and that it just came out of the blue, his disappearance. And we were just so moved by that story. And then the next day, it was just natural that we stayed there.
Because I know this river well. I’ve been going on it for the past ten years, and that’s why we had this idea to write this fiction film that would take place on the river, just because I love that river so much. It’s Europe’s last wild river, one of the only unregulated rivers left in Europe. It’s a huge force of nature. Also a very dangerous river, with currents and with a lot of shallowness in the summers, hard to navigate. You have to kind of, you know, spend a lot of time on it, learn its flow, learn its ways. That’s why probably there’s not many people there, even in summer. Although when we met Daniel, it was the end of summer.
But so, you know, it was just natural, because this particular stretch of the river that Daniel searches on, I would go on it very often, because it was close to where I lived, and I had a little boat by the river for many years when I was living in Warsaw. So it was just natural that I kind of stayed and just helped him out on the search.
And then after spending that whole day together, we exchanged numbers. And I didn’t mention that I was a documentary filmmaker. And I went back with my wife to write the fiction film that we wanted to shoot next summer. But I just kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel, and I reached out to him again and offered my help. He also asked that, because he said that all the help that he’s getting in the search comes from volunteers or just people he kind of meets.
So a week later, I joined them on the search again. And that day, his father was there, at seventy-five years old, the grandfather of Chris, the kid that went missing. When I saw Daniel, the father, searching for his son, and then the grandfather searching for his grandson, but at the same time, the grandfather looking into his son Daniel’s eyes and being scared that he’s gonna lose another person to the river, because at that point, you know, Daniel was very obsessed with the search and just spending so much time on the water, and also in dangerous places, and just giving it all that he has to search these murky depths for any traces. You know, when I saw those eyes, I felt like, oh my God, the fiction film can wait. I have to do this.
But also, in that week before, I saw that this was a big story on the Polish news, which I did not know about. I did not hear about this disappearance before. So in that week, I watched the TV reportages that were done. And what actually gave me the courage to ask Daniel if he would be okay with me making a movie was the fact that I saw that he had already opened up his life to cameras. He and his wife, you know, allowed the cameras in their home, into Chris’s room. They shared some of their stories. So they were already open to sharing their story with the public.
And what kind of gave me the courage and the impetus to actually go ahead was that I saw that these reportages, or news stories, were done in a very bad way, and I felt they did not do justice to the cause. They did not show the man that I met for those two nights on that island, and they did not touch on the depth of the psychology that I saw. On the contrary, I would say that they probably did more harm than good, because a lot of hate then appeared on the internet, because they were cut in a very sensationalist way. You know how sometimes in the news they wanna up the view count. So they were even edited in a very mischievous way, I would even say. Kind of pointing that maybe the parents, like, missed something, maybe they were a part of… you know, just like the worst, yes, the worst way that you would treat this kind of a story.
So I got very angry at that. And I got very angry that, you know, this is kind of what’s going out, and I spent two days with this man and this family, and no, this is not what they’re going through. And yeah, so it was a mixture of all these feelings that gave me the courage to then call Daniel after that, you know, the second search, and be like, “Listen, maybe we could do something with a higher resolution, something with more depth, a bigger film that would show what it is that you’re going through,” just because I resonate with it so much.
Vanessa: Yeah, literally more depth, more depth in the cinematography, in the way the story is told, in the way you gain access to what Daniel’s really going through, and not sensationalizing or trivializing the disappearance of his son, Chris, which has all those grotesque true crime elements that do exploit the story and exploit the family. That’s such a humanitarian impulse, a genuine human impulse you had. You show us the beauty of the river and the danger and the horror of it.
Michał: Yeah, I think, you know, with so much true crime around, people just seem to fall in that trap, and they seem to, like, true-crime every case. And, you know, some cases, probably murders or whatever, if you wanna solve a murder or something, you could go that path. But you can’t adopt that method to, you know, this kind of a case. It just doesn’t work. And if you do that, it’s beside the point. You lose the point. You lose everything that this is about, and you turn this into something that is just absurd.
Vanessa: What really comes across in your film is feeling like we are there, like we’re on the river, we’re in the boat, we’re dredging the depths, and we feel what Daniel’s feeling. And I wonder how, as a filmmaker, because you have some serious filmmaking skills, you approached image and sound and balanced the grim reality of what he is going through as a father with an extraordinary film.
Michał: Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, I mean, this was the most technically demanding film, and also emotionally, I mean, I think on any level, the most demanding film I’ve ever worked on. But yeah, from a cinematic standpoint, I really wanted to make it in a way where you, as the audience, feel that you were there, that you can then bridge that empathy gap and feel what it’s like to be a parent in this situation, to be a person that’s trying to answer a question that may be unanswerable, but that’s also, you know, looking back at his life, asking questions of what happened, of what could have been done better. So just to really make it feel that you’re there with him, so that in turn the audience can then ask themselves those very, you know, simple and, I think, profound questions about how they lead their life, and how they lead their life with their children, if they have children, or with their friends or best friends.
So in order to do that, you know, I was really building on the documentaries that shaped me when I was young. We have this huge tradition in Poland of making these very cinematic documentaries, and those were the ones that I saw when I was seventeen for the first time, like Kieślowski, Marcel Łoziński, a lot of these big directors that would actually switch between fiction and doc. And I think when they did that, and especially the cinematographers, when they would go on to make these big movies but then come back and do a small doc, they brought back with them that entire knowledge of the language of cinema and infused it into the docs they were making. So the docs, they never had talking-head interviews. They were shot on film. Sometimes they had these extremely beautiful, long kind of master shots. But of course, they were all captured in the moment. So I was always enthralled by that, and I really wanted to get to that level.
So I spent a lot of time working as an editor, working as a cinematographer. I shot this film. And in order to achieve that look, I think what also really helped is the advancement of technology, that I could use kind of that thinking but pair it with the most advanced tech, so that I had, like, a very lightweight camera, a gimbal. Like, I actually 3D print some of my own stuff and modify the equipment in order to be able to pull focus myself and have all the dials and controls on my hands, so that I don’t have to work with an assistant. Because a lot of the gear that you get, you know, most of the gear is made for bigger crews or for shooting shorter takes. So that’s why I had to kind of… I have this engineer that I work with, and we try to do everything carbon fiber, so it’s the lightest possible, so that I could actually go out and shoot for, like, five hours straight in this very cinematic way. And sometimes even running my own sound, so my rig has special microphones, very lightweight.
So it’s, like, a very precise way of making films, in order to really just lose myself in the moment. What I love is when I feel, when I’m shooting, that I lose sense of time and place, and I’m just kind of, like, in sync with the main protagonist. And, you know, I just have a feeling: is he gonna go right? Then I go right, right? And I just can anticipate what he’s gonna do, so that the camera flows, and it feels kind of like you’re doing a master shot. But it’s, you know, it’s not pre-planned. It’s all just being there in sync together.
And when those moments happen, it usually is the things that we end up using in the edit. Like, those are the moments where just, you know, something really clicked. We were just in the zone. He was so focused on what he was doing. I was so focused on what I was doing. And we synced. And in this movie, I was just very fortunate to have a lot of those moments, just because I think, you know, the emotional stakes were just very, very high.
Vanessa: Very high, and very real to you, because you weren’t just a filmmaker sort of in the zone, in sync with your subject. He was also, in a way, becoming your friend, and you were helping him with his search, right? You both felt this larger purpose, maybe, that this was a story that can help all parents with loss.
Michał: We definitely felt, yeah. I mean, it’s one of the first things that Daniel said. He’s like, “Listen, you know, if maybe with this film we could somehow find Chris, maybe he sees it and he then contacts us, then of course that would be beautiful. But if that does not happen, then maybe, you know, we could have less of these tragedies happen in the world. So I’m gonna open up my life and allow you to film anything you want, because I trust you. Just please don’t fuck up, and make a film that will affect people emotionally.”
So I really felt that trust that the family gave me, which was just, you know, they were just so open. So I felt this huge burden of, first of all, doing a film that they would be proud of, but also a film that… yeah, now I’m a father of two, you know, and I worry about these things a lot. And I see the mental health crisis in teenagers, and, you know, the fact that 500,000 people go missing every year just in Europe and the U.S. alone, and that suicide is the leading cause of death among young people worldwide. You know, these are huge problems that I knew I was tackling. And I don’t like movies that talk to people about a cause. And I just really felt that by showing this very singular story, maybe we could inspire people to think differently, you know?
And, like, the most beautiful comment that I get is when I have a Q&A and someone runs out and says, like, “Listen, sorry, man, I can’t stay for the Q&A. I have to call my mom,” or “I have to call my dad,” “I have to call my kid.” That’s just… that’s kind of what I really set out to achieve, and I think we did achieve it, and that’s just, you know, it’s beautiful.
And the family has been getting a lot of texts as well, just from teenagers, which is extremely sad, you know, that have shared their stories of, you know, having hard times and maybe even trying to take their life. And after seeing the film… like, I just got this voice message, actually a couple of voice messages. It seems to be, like, the Gen Z thing, that they record messages instead of texting. And so you could hear the emotions in the voice in the recording. And I’ve received already a couple of these messages where people say, like, “Dude, I saw your film, and I did have hard moments, and I never told this to anyone. I did want to, like, think of ending my life, but after seeing this film, I know I never will do that.” And you could hear the people kind of getting emotional. I don’t know, I cried when I, you know, got those messages. So hopefully we’ll do some good with this film, you know, just a little bit.
Vanessa: Yeah. You’re showing a young person of any age that their lives matter. Stay connected in the now, people running out of your screening and making phone calls to their loved ones because they’re realizing that.
You do go between being on the river and being in Daniel’s home, and you’re with his wife and his son. Was it hard to also earn their trust, or have them agree that they would also be filmed and share what they’re feeling?
Michał: No, I mean, you know, I think we established really quickly, like, a very strong relationship with Daniel. I think the fact that I knew the river so well and spent so much time on it, that definitely helped. But I’m also, like, as I mentioned, a gear nerd, really working and honing my equipment to be able to do something that normally would take three or four people to do. And it’s the exact same thing that Daniel’s doing. Normally these searches are done by three, four people, and Daniel, he never sailed before, you know. He said he didn’t really like the water. He was never on a motorboat. He had to learn everything by himself in an extremely short amount of time. And then he had to optimize all his gear to be able to, many days, be out on the water and search alone. And I was also many times alone with my gear, because on that boat, for example, there was just not enough room to fit another person. So I think we meshed on many levels.
But also, and I think this is why, when you do films from, like, a very sincere… just when you’re enthralled by and can’t stop thinking about a certain subject matter, there’s good that comes back to you. Like, not that I forgot, but I didn’t think about it when I first met Daniel, but I lost my dad when I was eleven, in a car accident. And it was when I would spend more time with Daniel on these islands, and our relationship… you know, Daniel would ask me these questions. So it went both ways. I think we helped each other, you know, really in both ways. And he would ask me a lot about that time and how I, you know, dealt with grief.
And then I realized, like, I didn’t really deal with grief. For example, you know, like, my thing was running away to a movie theater and watching five movies a day on the weekend, and after school, maybe two. And after three years, the pain kind of passed away, and I moved on. And I realized that I never allowed myself to actually properly grieve. And by spending that time with Daniel, all these memories came back to me that I had kind of repressed. And I realized that even on that level, I seem to be very similar to him. That, you know, he’s also throwing himself into the search and, you know, the equipment, and helping others, as a way as well of postponing grief, which we both realized at a certain moment, and had this very cathartic moment.
So I think because of all that, and because you could feel so much of that, I think, even before we actually got to know each other better, from the start, this was an extremely open relationship, where I felt that I could film everything.
Vanessa: Yeah. That is very true of grief, that it can be postponed. It can be delayed for years, and then something can trigger it. I feel like Daniel’s both processing it in the searching, and maybe in the bond with you, as you’ve said, and also possibly delaying it. But he’s really there for his family and for other people who start to turn to him, right? To, sometimes ahead of the police, help them find closure.
Michał: Yeah. We find versions of it, I think. I mean, I agree with you. I think, you know, the grief works on very many different levels. I think definitely there was a moment where he felt that he’s putting so much energy and so many resources into this search. And it’s actually a lot thanks to just really good-hearted people that either donated money or, you know, even showed up at his house and said, “Listen, what do you need?” And then, like, this woman showed up, and she bought Daniel this, like, super expensive sonar equipment. Just went to the store with him and bought him this sonar for, I think, over $20,000 or something, so that he could be searching.
So I think there definitely was a moment that we lived through where we just… nothing was happening. And I think there was a sense of, you know, maybe this is all gonna go in vain. And then, I don’t want to spoil the movie, but yes, Daniel did find people, and then he found way more. I think to this day, it’s about ten people that he found in the water, that were all, unfortunately, young people. Because the police in Poland, they only search for about a week. And then after that time, they kind of leave it to luck, right? Either the body floats up or somebody finds it, but there’s no active searching beyond that point. The funds are just too low, because searching just requires so many resources. And when it’s done officially, it’s a group of people, it’s many boats, it’s many people. Daniel is an extreme exception, that he’s learned to do it himself.
Vanessa: I want to give people a little bit of a visual, who haven’t seen the film yet, and I don’t think this will spoil the film. But when you’re talking about Daniel’s equipment, maybe for people who haven’t ever tried to dredge a river, can you just describe the equipment that he, as you said, learned and fashioned himself, so he could do this on his own without a crew? You show it very much in detail, so this is also part of the film.
Michał: Yeah, so there’s many, many different techniques. So, for example, anything from, like, devising these dummies that are filled with fabric in a way that the dummy would fill up with water just as a body would, and then would go underwater at a specific time. Because a body takes about twenty minutes for, like, the lungs to fill up with water and then to go down. And that moment is important, because then you know where to search and how the currents work. So he devised, like, a lot of these different dummies with GPS trackers, to be able to see how the body floats in the current and then when it goes underwater. And then the trackers had little ropes with balls, so that you could then see how the body behaves underwater.
Or even using these really kind of medieval techniques of throwing loaves of bread. That’s what they would do back in the day. They would throw a big loaf of bread with a candle on top at night and track its path with binoculars, because the bread also fills up in a similar way to a body, and the place where it goes underwater could be an indication of where the body is. But also using modern techniques, like underwater drones, or cameras on these long poles, to dredge the water and the mud that’s there, rakes, and all types of other tools.
And they’re also searching for him over land, because there is a chance that he might have walked down from the bridge. There’s a chance that he might have escaped, and there are some leads pointing to that. That’s why the family is so torn. So they also use drones with thermal cameras to search over land. So Daniel had to learn how to use boats and navigate the river, how to operate drones, underwater drones and normal drones. So just so much technology, all to be able to do this with a small crew.
Vanessa: It is possible that your film being out there and having a long life will maybe lead to more information coming forward? Has anything changed since you’ve been screening the film all over the world, been on the road? Are you learning any more details? Is there a chance of achieving some kind of closure for Daniel, or the family?
Michał: Hope so. I mean, so far nothing big has happened. But Daniel has helped numerous other people, because the word got out that he’s the go-to person, kind of, because there really aren’t many people in Poland that you can reach out to. So families in similar situations have been reaching out, and Daniel has been actually traveling all over Poland to different rivers and lakes. Just today he texted me that he found a seventeen-year-old girl that was missing for many years. So yes, extremely sad. Grim. But also, yes, people have been reaching out that are experts in the field, kind of giving their expertise from all over the world. So that has definitely helped. But no breakthrough right now when it comes to Chris.
Vanessa: How can we tell people to see the film? And congratulations, it’s a really beautiful film.
Michał: Thank you. So we opened at the IFC Center on Wednesday, October 28th. And we had two preview screenings at the IFC Center with a Q&A with the whole film team, well, the three of us: producer Rémi Grellety, producer Monika Braid, and me. And then the movie will continue playing at the IFC Center.
At the beginning of November, it opens in LA, and then kind of rolling to other cities in America after that. And our distributor is 1-2 Special, so on the 1-2 Special website or on the Closure Instagram, we for sure will be sharing all those screening dates.
Vanessa: Amazing. Congratulations. A deeply moving film that has profound ripple effects.
Michał: We hope. You know, we really tried. For the impact strategy, from the start, because this is such a fragile subject matter, that I did not know before, that I’ve never, you know, encountered. So from the start, we were actually working with, like, Poland’s top psychologists and traumatologists, and suicidologists, actually. So that’s also why we started cutting the movie right as soon as we started shooting, kind of a month after we started shooting, because I wanted to show the footage and to make sure that I’m, you know, not in any way promoting suicide, because sometimes the line is very thin.
And so we had these great consultants, and what kind of very much struck me is, I asked, “Listen, what tips can you give me on making this film?” And they said, “Listen, show the brutal truth. Show, like, a decomposing body. Show the hardcore of death.” And I was like… and they explained it to me, and this is what really struck me, is that what all their research globally says, or points to, is that there’s still a huge tendency to idealize death and suicide.
And there’s a moment in the film where we have the father kind of discovering Chris’s online presence, and, like, the TikToks. And there’s some films that kinda point to suicide, but they don’t really point at the suicidal mindset or anything. It’s these films that turn out to be extremely popular on TikTok right now, which the TikTok algorithm pumps, that kind of make a joke of suicide. So this one film, this girl watches another couple having fun and being happy together, making out, and she’s like, “How cute. I think I’m gonna take a shower.” And she takes a toaster and a knife. And then the film cuts.
And when we screened this film, because we actually did a very big outreach campaign in Polish schools, because the film was rated 16 and up, and the psychologists also really told us to screen it as much as we can to schools and to teenagers. And we did those screenings in America and all over Europe and in Poland. And what really struck me is that all the kids picked up on those TikTok videos. They’re like, “Yeah, of course, we watch all that stuff.” And even though some of those films were in Polish, they’re like, “Yeah, we have the exact same. It’s just, you know, they’re in English. We have the same motif.” And then I, you know, did research on those films, and they have, like, 20, 30, 40 million views, or reposts, sorry, because TikTok is all about reposts. So views is probably much more. If you have 30 million reposts, you know, the view count is probably much higher.
And it’s these films that, like, poke fun at suicide, but basically what they’re saying, it’s like, yeah, if you don’t have friends, if you can’t fall in love, if nobody likes you, then maybe it’s better to kill yourself. And it does it supposedly in an ironic way. But then the psychologists said, like, “Listen, when you have all this other idealization of death and suicide, like, you know, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, and everything, and all these pop culture songs that kind of idealize death, that if you’re in a moment when you’re, like, sixteen, seventeen, your hormones are buzzing, something happens in your life, you know, your brain isn’t fully developed yet, self-control isn’t fully developed yet, and all of a sudden you start feeling really bad, then all these things, they speak to you in a way that could push you to do something, right?”
So that’s why they said, “Listen, bring this film out to young people and show the toll that it takes on everybody around, and the pain that such a decision causes, and the destruction in not only the family, but the friends.” Like, they say that a suicide, you know, affects a whole community, right? So to really show that, and not be afraid of showing, like, a body.
Because what really struck me is, like, the question that they found that they ask the most in suicide help hotlines is, “Who do you think is gonna identify your body?” And that really makes people, like, calm down and think about the gravity of potentially what they might be doing, right? Because they imagine their body in a certain state, and someone has to, like, come to the morgue and pick it up. And they try to be as graphic as possible when they ask that question, because they find that that’s what kind of takes people away from the ledge.
So, yeah, that’s why we allowed ourselves to make this film, you know. That was kind of the guiding principle, to show, like, really from the perspective of the family, and to show the river in such a way where it does raise your imagination of the toll it would take if someone were to do something to themselves.
Vanessa: It does. That is really important, and I’m so glad you that you’re addressing it in the impact campaign. I was initially thinking about the toll, but in terms of a child feeling their importance in the world, that they are connected to other people, that it’s that loss of any sense of connection, or even imagination about why you matter, that allows someone to get to a ledge. But you’re right. And you’ve done the research, and you’ve spoken to the experts, and you’ve embedded this in the making of the film and the impact campaign. It’s profound. So thank you.
Michał: Yeah… but on the other hand, I don’t want to scare the audience, you know, too much away. This movie is quite cinematic, and it does sometimes watch as a thriller. So I think, you know, it has hope at the end, and it’s got light. So just a shout-out to the audience: you know, it’s got dark moments, but it’s got also moments of lightness. And so, yeah, I try to show life kind of as it is, I guess, in this kind of a situation.
Vanessa: Yeah. Something that documentary, especially a filmmaker like you, is uniquely positioned to do. And thank you for making this film. Thank you for sharing it.
Michał: Thank you. Thank you so much for helping me share it with the world.
CLOSURE will be playing in
LOS ANGELES
at Laemmle Glendale on Friday, November 13
& ROLLING OUT ACROSS THE U.S.
FIND IT AT A THEATER NEAR YOU ON THE
1-2 SPECIAL WEBSITE:
https://closure.movie/
