Polanski returns to Poland for doc on his early life
WARSAW, Poland — A Polish film company said Tuesday that Oscarwinning director Roman Polanski has travelled to Poland to appear in a documentary about his early life during the Holocaust and after the war in Poland.
The KRK Film company said that Polanski was in Krakow to see the site of the former ghetto where he was held as a child by the Nazis. His mother was taken from there to her death at Auschwitz, and his father was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
The 84-year-old director also visited the village of Wysoka, where he was in hiding after fleeing the Krakow ghetto. New York photographer Ryszard Horowitz, a friend of Polanski’s since they met as boys in the ghetto, accompanied him. It wasn’t clear when the documentary would be released.
It was Polanski’s first visit to Poland since the country’s Supreme Court refused last year to have him extradited to the U.S. to be sentenced in a 1977 unlawful sex case involving a 13-year-old victim.
Since he fled the U.S., Polanski mostly has lived in Paris, where he was born.
The director fled in 1978 on the eve of sentencing when the nowdeceased judge in the case suggested in private remarks that he would renege on a plea bargain and sentencing agreement.
His travels have since been restricted to France as well as to Poland and Switzerland, where authorities have rejected U.S. requests for his extradition.
Polanski won an Academy Award for best director for his 2002 film The Pianist and was nominated for 1974’s Chinatown and 1979’s Tess.