Roman Polanski, hero of a Holocaust documentary in Poland: the project was audacious. In Promenade à Cracovie, Mateusz Kudla and Anna Kokoszka-Romer film the wanderings of the filmmaker and a friend, the photographer Ryszard Horowitz, in Podgórze, where the Nazis were to imprison thousands of Jews from March 1941. The two men recall the months spent in what will be called the Jewish ghetto of Krakow. Tragic story at the end of which the director will lose his mother and his grandmother, deported to Auschwitz.
Walk in Krakow, whose release date has been set for July 5, is only scheduled in two theaters in France. According to its distributor, theater operators are refusing to screen it because of the cases involving Roman Polanski, repeatedly accused of sexual assault and rape and convicted in 1977 of drugging and then raping a 13-year-old girl.
Read the fileAll you need to know about the Polanski affair
“What I see is first of all a refusal to see the film. There are plenty of exhibitors who tell us “It’s Polanski, we don’t want to see him”, testified Michèle Halberstadt, general manager of ARP France and distributor of the film, on the set of C à vous. She also explains that she has the greatest difficulty in convincing journalists to come and see the documentary in press screening.
Despite the accusations against the filmmaker – and the controversy caused by his prize for best director for J’accuse at the Césars, in 2020 -, Michèle Halberstadt believes that “we can be moved by someone’s past and see that there is a problem with his present. Before specifying that as a woman and a Jew, she considers herself to be in a good position to defend this film.
