It seems as though France has hopped on-board the Roman Polanski condemnation train.
“Promenade à Cracovie,” a documentary in which Polanski recollects his brutal memories as a survivor of the holocaust, is barely getting released in France. A whopping two theaters will screen it for a week, nobody else wants to touch it.
The doc’s producer, Michèle Halberstadt, told Telerama that the controversy surrounding the filmmaker is to blame:
I don’t necessarily expect more theaters to be added and I expected it to be a complicated situation. What shocks me is that exhibitors, circuits as well as independents, refused, in principle, to see the film. Cowardly. They said that their customers would not want to see it. But the documentary is very moving, it won a prize in Rome, another one in Poland. I even had several journalists, that saw and loved the film, who confessed to me that their editors preferred for it to not to be covered.
The news gets even worse for Polanski. His upcoming film “The Palace” doesn’t have a French distributor. A French source told me this morning that he bets “it will be a direct to VOD thing in France”.
Polanski’s last film “J'accuse” was a box-office hit in France with over 1.5 million tickets sold and it even won him the César in 2020 for Best Director.
When Polanski won the César, actress Adèle Hanael walked out in the middle of the ceremony yelling “SHAME!” Haenel expressed to The New York Times how repulsed she was by her peers’ recognition of Polanski “Distinguishing, Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims. It means raping women isn’t that bad,” said the actress.
Protests ensued afterwards, the Cesar administration was ousted and a new edict banning Polanski from future ceremonies was installed.
Meanwhile, there are rumors that Polanski’s “The Palace” might premiere at Venice, but that’s not even a certainty. It’s a messy situation and it got worse when a French outlet claimed this past week that “The Palace” was actually rejected from Cannes (“they didn’t even want to see it.”)
Back in 2020 Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux defended Polanski when he visited a used DVD store for a YouTube show. These were his exact words:
“There’s a Polanski section (in the store), all his films. If we were in the United States, it wouldn’t be available. No Woody Allen section and no Polanski section. It revolts me […] It’s not Polanski’s films that are being debated, but people want to prevent him from making more films and they want to persuade his films to not be seen.”
It seems as though it’s not anymore a phenomenon reserved exclusively for the United States. The French have hopped on-board as well.