Roman Polanski's ‘An Officer and a Spy' Finally Screens in the UK

In 2019, Roman Polanski premiered one of the best films of his career. He even won the Grand Jury prize at Venice for it. A few months later, it was nominated for 12 French Cesar awards, and it later won Polanski the Best Director award. Yet the film still hasn’t been released in the US and UK.

“An Officer and a Spy,” which explores the real-life Dreyfus affair in France at the beginning of the 20th century, is the real deal. Polanski crafted his film with absolute surgical genius. Only a master can make a film as sublimely atmospheric and textural as this one.

Polanski’s film is shot with a poet’s eye by longtime Polanski DP Pawel Edelman, whose gorgeous frames here are naturally lit. “An Officer and a Spy”, a cautionary tale of due process, hits home because, as you watch the film, you realize that the 19th-century authoritative setting Polanski is presenting us on-screen is eerily similar to ours. It is very much intended as a modern-day parable, a movie about the repercussions of groupthink, and mob justice.

As it stands, four years later, and despite having been released in numerous countries around the world, “An Officer And A Spy” still hasn’t been released in the US and UK. Not a single major distributor in any English-speaking country wants to touch the film.

This will kinda, sorta, change this weekend as the Jewish Film Festival will host the first public screening of the film in the UK. 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 want to censor art. We want to give audiences the choice of whether they want to watch a film by Roman Polanski.

Due to the current socio-political climate, Polanski has been blacklisted in the UK and US over a late ’70s statutory rape case — the same case which, lest we forget, didn’t stop the Academy from honoring Polanski with their Best Director statuette back in 2003 for the holocaust drama, “The Pianist.”

U.S. distribution companies have rejected buyers’ invitations to watch the film at the various markets. Howard Cohen of Roadside Attractions stated: "I think we would consider it, though I'm not even sure how I personally feel. People have been releasing his films for years. Now, we are looking at it through a different lens, with good reason. We have to search our souls if it's the right thing to do. What does it mean to release this movie? I don't think that's a settled question even in my mind."

And so, despite “An Officer and a Spy” winning awards at Venice, Paris, and topping critics polls all over Europe, US audiences will likely never get to see Polanski’s great film. The censoring of art should have no place in our culture, and yet it’s still very prevalent.