Polish director Michał Marczak’s “Closure,” about a father’s relentless search for his missing son and its harrowing aftermath, won the Golden Alexander Award at Thessaloniki International Airport. Sunday is the Documentary Festival.
The international competition jury, made up of film editor Dana Bunescu, curator, programmer, producer and creative executive Caroline Libresco, and producer Yorgos Paparios, awarded the festival’s top prize to a film that “makes the most of cinema and gives us the experience of becoming one with the inner life of a father in an impossible situation, creating something radically out of absence.”
Marchak, who attended the Thessaloniki festival last year to promote “Closure” at the Agora industry program, accepted the award and called it “a very important moment for this film.” The film centers on a family in Warsaw whose teenage son one day disappears without a trace. He also thanked Daniel, the film’s central character, and his family “for letting me tell this story.”
The film, Marchak’s second, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. Murtada El-Fadl of Variety magazine described this “fascinating nonfiction” as a “devastating study of love and loss”, noting that the film “plays like a thriller, but manages to deliver honest, piercing emotion in almost every scene along the way”.
The Polish filmmaker’s previous documentary feature, All These Sleepless Nights, premiered in Park City in 2016 and won the Best Director award at the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
Silver Alexander in International Competition made his directorial debut with Janay Boulos and Abd al-Kader Habak’s Birds of War, which won four awards in the afternoon. The film, which premiered at Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition, tells the love story of Boulos, a London-based Lebanese journalist, and Habak, a Syria-based activist and cameraman, and delves into their personal archives of 13 years of revolution, war, and exile.
The Special Jury Prize in this category also went to Jukka Kerkainen for “The Beauty of Errors” and Yulia Lokshina’s “Around Paradise.”
The Golden Alexander Award for Best Newcomer, which features the debut and second films of up-and-coming directors, went to Mary Bouli’s At No Cost. The film is a documentary about a young Athenian woman who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer and decides to become an egg donor to earn a living. Silver Alexander went to Chouwa Liang for “Replica,” about the growing number of young Chinese women choosing partners generated on-demand by an AI program.
New jurors included documentary filmmaker Melody Gilbert, film director and editor Farahnaz Sharifi, and documentary filmmaker Krissa Tserepi.
In the Film Forward competition, which “challenges the conventional wisdom of cinema and introduces unconventional films,” Golden Alexander was selected for director Kristiana Keilanagnostaki’s “Dear Future.” The film has been described as a documentary that explores “the liminal space between what has been lost and what is yet to come.” Silver Alexander commissioned Carlos Mora Fuentes and Anna Berkoff to make Rebel, a film about a landscape that is being irreversibly altered by climate change.
The jury consisted of programmer and visual artist Aikaterini Gezisian, architect and cultural programmer Sandra Pires, and programmer and ECAM forum coordinator Alberto Valverde.
In the Immersive: All Around Cinema competition, Golden Alexander competed in “Another Place” directed by Domenico Sinha Pedroli.
The 28th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, to be held from March 5th to 15th, will conclude with a special screening of the Academy Award-nominated film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” followed by a live broadcast of the Oscar Awards from the Dolby Theater.
