Roman Polanski Film Gets UK Screening At Jewish Film Festival, 5 Years After VFF Prize And No Release
deadline.comRoman 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.
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