Roman Polanski announces his first film in the #MeToo era, called J'Accuse



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By Laurent Viteur / Getty Images.

Bill Cosby may be in prison. Harvey Weinstein maybe hide. But Roman Polanski is alive and well, preparing his first film at the time #MeToo. He even has an Oscar winner.

French producers Légende Films confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Polanski will start filming his next film, the political thriller I accuse, this autumn in Paris. Louis Garrel will be Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the real French Jewish soldier mistakenly accused of espionage for the Germans in the 1890s. The scandal, which divided the country, ended dramatically in 1906 when Dreyfus was exonerated after having spent five years in the Devil's Island penal colony for high treason. L & # 39; artistOscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin will be the star of the counterintelligence that justified Dreyfus. Mathieu Amalric, Olivier Gourmet, and Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner will complete the cast. Polanski develops the film for six years, with a scenario of the British novelist Robert Harris.

The subject – a man wrongly accused and proving his innocence decades later – is likely to spark some interesting press conversations at the time of the film's final release. Polanski is currently investigating convictions in the United States after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old. Samantha Geimer– in 1977. Despite the plea, Polanski has achieved a successful film career, even winning an Oscar for Best Director. The pianist in 2003.

But the #MeToo era has already affected Polanski. Last May, the filmmaker was expelled from the Academy of Arts and Film Science, along with Bill Cosby. (Weinstein was expelled from the Academy in October 2017.)

Polanski called the decision "the height of hypocrisy" and, according to his lawyer Jan Olszewski, objected to being grouped with Cosby. (Polanski's accuser even got his hands dirty, calling the deportation "ugly and cruel.")

In 2012, when he announced for the first time his intention to make a film about the Dreyfus scandal, Polanski said that this story was "absolutely relevant" given "the age-old spectacle of witch hunting on a band minority, security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, government blankets and a raging press ", according to T.H.R.

Last May, Polanski described the #MeToo movement as another example of mass hysteria that occurs from time to time in society. It is sometimes very dramatic, like the French Revolution or the massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, or sometimes less bloody, as in 1968 in Poland or American McCarthyism.

"Everyone is trying to support this movement, mainly out of fear," Polanski said. "I think it's a total hypocrisy."

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