Polanski win provokes French film awards walkout
Actresses leave ceremony and protesters clash with police as convicted rapist is crowned best director
ROMAN POLANSKI won the award for best director at the “French Oscars” ceremony, provoking walkouts by actresses, booing and cries of “shame” and “paedophilia”, as protesters clashed with police outside.
Florence Foresti, a comedian who hosted the Césars ceremony, said in an
Instagram post afterwards that she was “sickened” by the decision to honour the Polish-French director, wanted in the US for raping a 13-year-old girl.
Adèle Haenel, a French actress who says she was sexually abused at the age of 12 by another director, shouted “long live paedophilia” as she led a walkout by women in the audience, who chanted “shame, shame, paedophile”.
Polanski, 87, stayed away from the ceremony to avoid protests by feminist groups, which he described as a “public lynching”. About 100 protesters scuffled with police outside the venue.
Polanski’s film, An Officer and a Spy, based on Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus affair, received 12 nominations, more than any other film.
No one from his production team was at the ceremony in Paris’s Salle Pleyel to collect his prize or the two others it won for best adaptation and best costumes.
Franck Riester, the French culture minister, described the decision to honour Polanski as “regrettable”.
“It sends a negative signal at a time when the lead shroud over sexual and sexist assaults is exploding in our country,” he said.
The conservative newspaper Le Figaro commented that the Césars jury had decided to “postpone MeToo until later”, failing “to take into account the controversies causing turmoil in the French film industry” and the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction in the US.
The MeToo movement has unleashed a torrent of accusations of sexism, sexual harassment or rape from French female stars. Haenel, 31, has accused Christophe Ruggia, another French director, of sexually harassing her. He denies the allegation.
The Césars’ male-dominated board resigned two weeks ago over the Polanski row, but defended the nominations of his film, arguing that its role was not to take “moral positions”.
Brigitte Bardot is among Polanski’s defenders. The 85-year-old former screen icon praised him for “saving French cinema from mediocrity”, saying he should be judged “by his talent, not his private life”.
Polanski fled the US in the Seventies prior to sentencing after admitting statutory rape. He has denied a recent accusation that he raped Valentine Monnier, a French photographer in 1975, when she was 18. He was expelled last year from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the Venice Film Festival was criticised for including his work in its programme.