Documentary filmmaker Michał Marczak is set to make his fiction debut with "Perfection"
Documentary filmmaker Michał Marczak is set to make his narrative feature debut with "Perfection," a drama based on Vincenzo Latronico's novel of the same name, Variety reported on 23 October 2026. A narrative feature is a film with a scripted story and actors, rather than a film about real events.
The novel follows Anna and Tom, a millennial couple who live as expats in Berlin during the 2010s. Variety describes the project as a drama about hipster millennials in the German capital.
Marczak will write the English-language screenplay himself. The script will include dialogue that does not appear in Latronico's book, so the film will not simply copy the novel's lines. A screenplay is the written script that actors and crew work from.
Three producers have joined the project. Roman Paul of Razor Film in Germany, Andrea Calderwood of Potboiler Productions in Britain and Marta Donzelli of Vivo Film in Italy will share the producing work, which covers finding money, pulling together a crew and handling the legal and business side of a film.
The book has its own record. Latronico's "Perfection" was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, a major award for fiction written in another language and translated into English. The shortlist was announced on 8 April 2025, according to the Booker Prizes website. It is Latronico's fourth novel and his first to appear in English, translated by Sophie Hughes.
Marczak is best known so far for documentaries. In 2016 he won the World Cinema documentary directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the US independent film showcase, for "All These Sleepless Nights."
His most recent film, "Closure," is a documentary that follows a Polish father searching for his missing son. It had its world premiere at Sundance. In August 2026, Variety reported that the distributor 1-2 Special had acquired US rights to the film. A distributor is the company that releases a film to cinemas and streaming services. In September 2026, Deadline published a trailer and described "Closure" as an Oscar-contending documentary, meaning a film campaigning for an Academy Award nomination.
The move from documentary to fiction is a common path for film-makers who want to tell invented stories with their own cast. For Marczak, "Perfection" would be his first scripted feature. Its progress from here will depend on the producers and financiers named above.
