The first weekend of Millennium Docs Against Gravity – the prestigious international film festival in Poland – is underway after opening with Closure, the new film directed by Warsaw native Michał Marczak.

The wrenching documentary about a father’s desperate search for his missing teenage son won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece in March and premiered in World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance.

Marczak’s journey to make the film began as he spent time on the Vistula River in Warsaw. While on a raft with his family – the director was scouting locations for a fiction project — he noticed a man plying the waters intently in a boat. After engaging him in conversation, Marczak learned the man, named Daniel, was looking for his son Chris who had last been seen standing on the Warsaw Bridge overlooking the river.

“A rotating CCTV camera caught [Chris] there standing for 20 minutes. And as it swung back around, we don’t know if he jumped or made it off the bridge and possibly escaped,” Marczak told Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast. “The father decided to search the river by himself. He built this custom-made boat outfitted with cameras, sonars, drones to probe the murky waters. So, it’s a ‘an old man in the sea’ type of a story, a Fitzcarraldo-type character, fighting against all odds to find the truth about what happened.”

Marczak spent many months with Daniel as he continued his search, sometimes the two of them camping along the river.

“Many times, it was just easier to sleep on these islands or banks and so that you don’t waste time and that most of the time goes for the search,” he recalled. “After [searching] for hours and you sit down at night, exhausted, by the campfire, all these thoughts come to you — about what could I be doing better, or how could I navigate the challenges of raising my now two sons in this world? And where, as a society, we have gone wrong… Totally desolate, empty nature yields these kinds of more metaphysical conversations. So, we would just sit and contemplate our lives. And I would ask him for advice. He would ask me, and that’s how we became close to each other.”

Without knowing if his son jumped to his death or perhaps left the bridge and is still alive somewhere, Daniel cannot find closure, nor can his wife. Daniel keeps searching month upon month, unable to give up on his son, even as his father counsels against continuing what could be considered an obsession.

“It’s a psychological film about the effects of that situation on the family and on Daniel,” Marczak notes, adding, “and on other families as well.” Other families whose loved ones have gone missing after hurling themselves from the bridge.

Introducing the film at the Multikino Złote Tarasy venue in Warsaw, MDAG Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk said Closure had helped him deal with grief in his own life. The impact of Closure has been similarly profound for many viewers. In Thessaloniki, Marczak told us about a voicemail he received from a person who had seen the documentary.

“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,’” the director recalled. “And I cried when I heard that message.”

At the festival in Greece, Marczak told us the film came together at almost lightning speed by documentary standards.

“We did this movie in 14 months from the moment we met the protagonist and we shot for a year,” Marczak explained. “We were super-fast editing as we went, just really trying to stretch our resources and to get this movie out.”

In addition to Sundance and Thessaloniki, Closure has screened at True/False in Columbia, MO and will screen next month at Sheffield DocFest in the UK and at the Sydney Film Festival in Australia.

Nate Bargatze — one of the world’s top-selling stand-up comedians — wants to make his upcoming family movie The Breadwinner affordable for everyone to watch on he big screen.

The TriStar and Sony release opens in theaters on May 29, and marks his most high-profile project since hosting the Emmy Awards ceremony in September.

Based on an original script he wrote with Dan Lagana and directed by Eric Appel, The Breadwinner stars Bargatze as salesman Nate Wilcox and Mandy Moore as Katie, who is the ultimate mom. But when Katie’s household invention leads to a once-in-a-lifetime deal on Shark Tank and takes her on a prolonged business trip, Nate has to figure out how to keep the house from (literally) falling apart. He and his kids soon learn that while he may not do it like mom, he can figure out how to do it his way.

Studios can’t dictate pricing policies, but Bargatze is hopeful that cinema operators will treat The Breadwinner the same way they supported discounted pricing for showing of 80 for Brady.

Soon after Bargatze announced the “Nate Rate” on Instagram, insiders say AMC Theatres, the largest chain in the country, are among a number of circuits that have already agreed to use matinee pricing for showings of The Breadwinnner, while Cinemark may discount prices by as much as 25 percent. Pricing and availability will vary, so audiences will need to check their local listings.

“Hello, everybody! My movie The Breadwinner is coming out May 29 and I’ve got something very exciting that I wanted to let you know,” wrote Bargatze in his post. “So the Nate Rate is a special kind of lower ticket price because we want everyone to come out to this movie. This movie is for your grandparents, grandkids, aunts, uncles, friends, sister…anybody. Your dog. Cats I think will love this movie, specifically. Anybody that wants to come out.”

When interviewed for The Hollywood Reporter’s 2025 cover story on Bargatze — hailed as the “Nicest Man in Standup” — TriStar Pictures president Nicole Brown discussed The Breadwinner’s appeal for the Sony label. “The idea of his first film being so personal and authentic to him and his comedy felt like the perfect foray, and he’d really identified a space,” she said. “He was like, ‘I want to be able to watch a film with my whole family. We can go watch animation now, but there’s nothing with real people in it.’”  

An email from Susie Wiles ordering White House staff to stop leaking to the press was … leaked … on Friday, when Politico’s West Wing Playbook published the March memo.

In it, Wiles sternly states that “no staff member within the Executive Office of the President is permitted to speak with members of the news media without the explicit approval of the White House Communications Office. Unauthorized leaks will not be tolerated and are subject to sanction up to and including termination.”

Donald Trump’s handpicked top aide also appealed to staffers’ sense of the greater good.

“Violation of this policy can result in significant disruption to ongoing operations and can potentially endanger missions and activities of national significance,” she concluded.

Wiles has been working to tighten operational discipline across the administration. White House spokesperson Liz Huston defended the email to Politico, and said staff are subject to “a zero-tolerance policy against speaking to the media without explicit authorization.”

The push comes as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has crossed swords with the press, pushing many outlets to leave legacy seats at the Pentagon, and Donald Trump continues to bash individual reporters and networks on a regular basis.

As the Trump administration continues to slam Vanity Fair’s framing and context of its interviews with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, “The View” hosts are looking at the feature a bit differently. To the ABC hosts’ eyes, Wiles was actually incredibly intentional with what she said.

Wiles wrote the memo just a few months after her own interviews with Vanity Fair, in which she said the president has the personality of an alcoholic, called JD Vance’s pivot to Trump acolyte politically motivated, called Elon Musk an “avowed” ketamine user.