‘Closure’ Trailer: In Oscar-Contending Documentary, A Desperate Father Searches For His Missing Son

EXCLUSIVE: 1-2 Special is releasing a trailer for Closure, the award-winning documentary that has emerged as a strong contender for Oscar consideration.

Michał Marczak directed the film that follows a father, Daniel Dymiński, on a relentless search for his missing teenage son Chris, who was last seen on a bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw. The feature is set to open in U.S. theaters on October 28. Watch the exclusive trailer above.

Closure premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece and multiple prizes at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, including the Silesian Audience Award. It has also screened at Sheffield DocFest in the UK, DC/DOX in Washington DC, True/False in Columbia, MO, and Doc10 in Chicago and screens later this month at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas (where Marczak will take part in a documentary roundtable with a select group of fellow Oscar-contending filmmakers).

At the heart of Closure is a wrenching mystery: what happened to young Chris Dymiński. He was spotted on Gdańsk Bridge by rotating security cameras, but when the cameras came back around after an interval of several minutes, Chris was gone. Either he left the bridge on foot, or he leapt into the waters below. His father embarks on a mission to find him.

“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,” notes a release. “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.”

Closure is produced by Monika Braid, two-time Oscar-nominee Rémi Grellety (I Am Not Your Negro, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat), Michał Marczak, Katarzyna Szczerba, and Karolina Marczak, and co-produced by Sara Skrodzka. Executive producers include Danielle Turkov Wilson, Amy Shepherd, Tamar Guttmann, Clifford Wilson, James Costa, Trevor Burgess, Gary Hess, Melony & 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 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.

We spoke with the director at Sundance in an interview for Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast. He explained that he met Daniel Dymiński entirely by chance while Marczak, his wife and six-year-old son were on the Vistula River scouting for a fiction film that he wrote with his wife.

“At night, we met Daniel on one of these islands [in the Vistula],” he recalled. “He helped us actually get to shore safely at night. And then when we sat together the next morning and talked, we saw what he was doing and found out why. I was just so moved, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this story. I was supposed to continue writing the fiction film, but I kept on thinking about Daniel going out alone on the river.”

Marczak continued, “I reached out to him. We spent a couple of days together just helping out [on the search]… We really quickly connected. And I think that was another sign that kind of the stars aligned. It was meant to be that both of us found each other on that island and that we embarked on this really wild journey that lasted a year.”