Roman Polanski’s film An Officer and a Spy is to receive its UK premiere, five years after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and despite being frozen out of the UK and American film market due to the director’s criminal past.
The Times newspaper reports that the UK Jewish Film Festival will host the first public screening of the film, which explores the real-life Dreyfus affair in France at the beginning of the 20th century.
The chief executive of the UK Jewish Film Festival Michael Etherton told The Times that the subject matter of the film with its theme of anti-Semitism was “highly relevant,” and said:
“And as a festival increasingly faced with silence, which often amounts to censorship of British Jewish culture, we don’t ourselves want to be censoring art. We want to give audiences the choice of whether they want to watch a film by Roman Polanski.”
Polanski has had a chequered past with Hollywood since he became a fugitive from American justice in 1978, after he was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl and reportedly learned his plea of guilty to the lesser offence of sex with a minor would not be accepted, whereupon he took up residence in Europe. His film The Pianist won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2002, but he did not attend the ceremony to receive the award, and in 2019, at the height of the #MeToo movement, he was expelled from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts.
An Officer and a Spy stars Oscar winner Jean Dujardin, and is based on the bestselling novel by Robert Harris (who previously collaborated with Polanski on the adaptation of his novel for The Ghost). Harris told The Times:
“I completely understand people not wanting to have anything to do with him. That is completely legitimate and understandable. But I would prefer it if people had a choice.”
