French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski is currently in Poland making a documentary on his childhood and youth spent in Krakow during the Holocaust and the Second World War in Krakow, said The Hollywood Reporter. The director had fled the country in the 1970s after he was convicted for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. Polanski, who lives in France, has returned to Poland for the first time after that country’s Supreme Court turned down a request to extradite him to the US last year.
The documentary, with the working title Polansk, Horowitz will focus on the years Polanski spent with his longtime friend, photographer Ryszard Horowitz. “Polanski was 9 years old when he met Horowitz, then age 3, in a Jewish ghetto in the city,” the Hollywood Reporter said. The report said that Horowitz, now 78, is one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust. His story was included in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning movie Schindler’s List.
“For us, this film is a great responsibility,” producer Anna Kokoszka-Romer told the publication. “Our main characters entrusted us with their incredibly personal memories. They have so many stories to tell, sometimes it’s really hard for us to keep up.”
Polanski also visited the Jewish ghetto where he was held by Nazis as a child. “The greatest suffering was having to live without my parents,” the Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying. “First, they took my mother from the ghetto, then my father.”
Polanski was recently in the news after a former German actress and model accused him of raping her.