The controversial Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski is making a discreet return: his childhood during the Holocaust is at the heart of a Polish documentary which will be released in a small handful of cinemas on Wednesday July 5.
For the distributor of Promenade in Krakow, the film bears the brunt of the controversies surrounding the filmmaker. The programmers of the rooms “refuse to see it”, assures Michèle Halberstadt (ARP), “they tell me that, in the context, it is better not” to program it. The operators, they deny, questioning its quality.
The documentary follows the Oscar-winning director for The Pianist (2003) for 1:15, in the streets of Krakow, alongside his childhood friend, the American photographer Ryszard Horowitz. The two survivors of the Holocaust met in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow during the war and return to the footsteps of this period, to which Polanski dedicated The Pianist.
The film organizes their reunion in these places and talks about “memory, confrontation with the past, the ephemeral, trauma, destiny”, explained to AFP one of the directors, Mateusz Kudla, during of the Krakow Film Festival. “Through these two characters who were lucky, who survived, we also wanted to show the tragedy of all those who lived in the Krakow ghetto and never left,” he adds. With his co-director, Anna Kokoszka-Romer, they found the grandson of Stefania and Jan Buchala, the Polish peasant couple who hid the young Polanski for almost two years in the south of the country. The documentary shows the complicity between the two survivors, who modestly evoke the horror of the Holocaust and their traumas.
Walk in Krakow does not address the rest of the filmmaker’s life, until the accusations of rape against him, which have earned him legal proceedings in the United States for more than 40 years, and to be persona non grata in Hollywood. The situation was different in France until the release of I accuse, in 2019. Roman Polanski, targeted by four accusations of sexual assault or rape which he disputes, will obtain a César for best achievement, awarded in his absence .
The departure of actress Adèle Haenel from the hall, in protest, has become a symbol of the fight against sexual violence in the cinema world. The director has since kept a low profile but has filmed The Palace in Switzerland with Mickey Rourke and Fanny Ardant, which is due to be released in Italy on September 28, a few weeks after the Venice Film Festival. No French or American release date has been announced. Polanski is to be tried in March 2024 in France for defamation of one of his accusers, actress Charlotte Lewis.
