Marc Schmidt

Schmidt's career didn't follow a straight line. Sound first. Then directing. It's a path that's more common in European documentary circles than it might seem, and it left a mark on how he works — there's a listening quality to his films that you don't always get from directors who came up through camera or editing. His directorial work began drawing attention with *Matthew's Laws* in 2012, a documentary that examined social and behavioral codes in ways that felt more observational than polemical (dafilms.com). Two years later, *The Chimpanzee Complex* (2014) pushed that interest further — using the lens of primate behavior, or at least the human fascination with it, to probe something about how we construct hierarchies and rules. *Bewaarders* followed in 2018, continuing Schmidt's pattern of finding the documentary subject that lets him ask the same questions from a new angle without repeating himself. Hard to say if Schmidt ever had a single breakout moment in the conventional sense — his reputation seems to have built through festival circuits and documentary platforms rather than a splashy theatrical release. His personal website (marcschmidt.nl) and his profile on DAFilms, a platform specifically dedicated to documentary cinema, suggest an audience that's engaged and niche rather than mass-market. His 2025 film *Hoe te verdwijnen* — the title translates roughly to 'How to Disappear' — marks his most recent work and indicates he's still actively directing, more than a decade into his career as a filmmaker. Swiss Films also carries a profile for a Marc Schmidt, though whether that entry refers to the same Netherlands-based director or a separate individual with the same name isn't entirely clear from available sources (Swiss Films).