Author(s): Christopher Sandford

Film

Fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made his first complete film - a two-minute student exercise which he called "Murder". In the half-century since, Polanski has become an iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually-charged films and yet derided as - in his own words - 'an evil, profligate dwarf'. In January 1978, facing a lengthy jail sentence for 'unlawful sexual intercourse' with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski fled the United States and flew to France, where he was a naturalized citizen. Thirty years later, he remains in exile: a much-revered filmmaker and a criminal fugitive 'never, for a single day', US authorities have said, free of the 'dread of arrest'. Others have told pieces of this story, but Christopher Sandford brings it all together in one lucid, gripping account, beginning with Polanski's horrific experience in the Holocaust and ending with his current life in Paris, where he provides a 'living symbol of Franco-American misunderstanding.'