Renowned Polish documentarian Michał Marczak, Sundance Film Festival winner for “All These Sleepless Nights,” will make his feature-length narrative debut with “Perfection,” a thrilling drama about hipster millennials in Berlin, based on Italian author Vincenzo Latronico’s eponymous novel, shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
German producer Roman Paul of Razor Film (“Quo Vadis, Aida?”), Briton Andrea Calderwood, head of leading London-based indie Potboiler Productions, and Italian Marta Donzelli, partner at Vivo Film (“The Last One for the Road”), have teamed up on the high-profile project. Donzelli was instrumental in winning the bidding war negotiated for the rights to the book with Latronico’s literary agent, Claire Sabatié-Garat.
Translated and sold in more than 40 countries, “Perfection” is about a millennial immigrant couple named Anna and Tom living their dreams in Berlin in the 2010s. The synopsis for the English edition of the book says: “As young digital creatives, their lives revolve around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation, and the city’s 24-hour party scene; an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and excitingly lived out on social media.”
“But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and boredom burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends return home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive policies amount in practice to little more than boycotting Uber, giving cash tips, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom embark on a fruitless attempt at political activism,” he adds. “Increasingly stuck in their perfect lives, the couple takes ever more radical steps in search of a sense of authenticity and purpose that they may not always grasp.”
“I’ve been living in Berlin since 1998, and together with all the young producers in my company, foreign or born there, we have been looking for an original intellectual property for a long time about what was happening there in the 2010s, when Berlin really meant something to the world,” Paul said. Diversity, We’re talking on the sidelines of the Rome MIA Market.
“In the early days of social media, people were more idealistic about what social media could achieve and how it allowed them to live the digital nomad life,” Calderwood said. “Because it is a perfectly formed novel, we think there is a way to make a perfectly formed film that has universal reach and appeal,” he added.
Marczak, who won the 2016 directing award in the Sundance World Cinema – documentary category for his film “All These Sleepless Nights,” is known for his hybrid style that blurs the line between documentary and fiction. His most recent work is the multi-award-winning “Closure,” about a teenager who disappears and his father’s relentless search for him. This film also bowed to Sundance and will be released in US theaters on October 28 via 1-2 Special.
Paul noted that Marczak’s films are “hybrid films, some of which focus on young people, for whom he has a very good eye and ear,” adding that his “visual sense is amazing.” He also noted that Marczak lived in Berlin and shot a 2012 film there, “Fuck for Forest,” about a real-life Berlin-based nonprofit that raises money for environmental causes by producing and selling eco-pornography online.
Marczak will write the English script of “Perfection,” which will include dialogues unlike Latronico’s atmospheric novel.
They said the producers were in “constant dialogue” with Latronico, who “was very supportive of our choice of director,” but that the book’s author would not be directly involved in the script.
The “Perfection” project is in early development with Marczak appointed as director; The next step is to write a treatment, followed by a script.
“There is a lot of interest in the intellectual property,” Calderwood said, adding, “We are taking a step-by-step approach, creating the development package before we launch it to market.”