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Polanski premieres film on Holocaust

By By Nigel Reynolds

May 26 2002

Roman Polanski with his partner Emmanuelle Seigner at a Cannes screening of The Pianist.

The film director Roman Polanski, still living under the shadow of sex charges in America, brought a film to the Cannes festival for the first time in 30 years on Friday.

The Pianist is a harrowing and powerful story about the Holocaust in Polanski's native Poland. It is likely to prove controversial because the director, who is Jewish, attempts to show that not all Nazis were bad and that not all Jews were victims.

He returned to Poland to make the film, the most personal of his career, and said that the experience was often "painful" and stirred up childhood memories. His mother died in Auschwitz and Polanski was smuggled out of the Krakow ghetto as a baby.

Polanski, 68, lives in France. He fled from America in 1978 after being charged with having sex with a 13-year-old girl at the home of Jack Nicholson, the actor.

He faces arrest if he returns, although it has been reported that a deal is being discussed to allow him back to stand trial with a guarantee that he would not be jailed. He has refused to give interviews on the subject.

The Pianist, already being compared with Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's film, is adapted from the biography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and survived the Nazi occupation, sheltered by friends.

Szpilman lost his entire family but after the war became a professional pianist of world standing. He died, aged 89, two years ago.

Adrien Brody, an American actor, plays Szpilman. The book describes how some Jews in the ghetto helped the Nazis, but also how a German officer hid Szpilman.

Polanski said: "There were good Poles and bad Poles, the same goes with the Jews, the same with the Germans. They are simply human. The book was like this and that is why I was attracted to it.

"It is probably my most personal film for the simple reason that I was able to use my own recollections of the period.

"It was actually more painful to go through the research preparations than it was shooting. However, during the six months of production there were moments that so vividly reminded me of events that I felt very taken aback."

When the war was over, Szpilman spent several years trying to find the German officer who had helped him, only to discover that he had died in a Soviet labour camp in the early 1950s.



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