Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has shown once again that he is not scared to court controversy.
The festival head has give Roman Polanski a safe festival berth for his new movie The Palace at Venice, in a selection that is likely to spark debate alongside the inclusion of Woody Allen’s Coeur de Chance.
They are among 12 films due to play Out of Competition at the 80th edition running August 30 to September 9.
Barbera told Italian journalists in a Q&A after the main line-up announcement that Polanski, who turns 90 in August, will not make the trip to the Lido, while Woody is down to attend.
The Palace will still make for a starry red carpet with its ensemble cast featuring Oliver Masucci, Fanny Ardant, John Cleese, Joaquim De Almeida, Luca Barbareschi, Milan Peschel, Bronwyn James, Fortunato Cerlino, Michelle Shapa and Mickey Rourke.
It is 45 years since Polanski fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and his victim Samantha Geimer has spoken on multiple occasions in Polanski’s defense, most recently in an interview with Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Sagnier.
But the director continues to divide opinion in his adopted home country of France and internationally, with a further fall from grace in recent years, following five fresh sexual assault allegations, all of which he had denied.
Polanski is no longer officially welcome at the ceremony for the French César awards ceremony, following a new measure introduced this year banning anyone “indicted or convicted for sexual violence,” although The Palace would still be eligible for nominations in the 2024 contest.
An Officer And A Spy controversially won the Cesars for Best Director and Best Film in 2020, causing actress Adèle Haenel to storm out of the ceremony in protest.
Polanski stayed away from the ceremony saying he feared being lynched after feminist activists called for demonstrations, after the film came out on top at the nomination stage.
Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux also told Deadline in 2022 that while he was open to selecting Polanski’s work, the director would probably shy away from showing it at the festival (where he won the Palme d’Or in 2002 for The Pianist) for fear of the controversy it would provoke.
Some 1,000 kilometres from Paris, which is the hub for those who might picket a Polanski-related event, Venice has proven a lone A-list safe haven for Polanski once again, where his last picture, the Dreyfus Case drama, An Officer And A Spy, invited to Competition in 2019.
The selection initially prompted an angry backlash online and in some parts of the press at the time when the #MeToo movement was still in full throttle, but the film went on to be warmly received by critics and public.
It won the Jury Prize in spite of a tense opening jury press conference in which president Lucrecia Martel acknowledged that she thought the Polanski case was complicated, even if she believed it was right for the film to play in Competition
Allen, whose star has also fallen in the wake of repeated public sexual assault allegations by adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, which he has denied and for which no charges have even been brought, will make the trip to the Lido.
He has not world premiered a new movie at an A-list festival since 2016, when he attended Cannes with Café Society in 2016, which played Out of Competition.
Again, Frémaux recently admitted it would be difficult for him to invite Allen to the Croisette in the light of the controversy around him.
Luc Besson is another director who will be stepping out in the limelight at Venice following a period of controversy to world premiere comeback film Dogman in Competition.
His invitation to the festival comes in the wake of France’s highest appeals court definitively dismissing rape allegations against him by Belgian-Dutch actress Sand Van Roy in June.
Buyers who have seen the film in private market screenings have been raving about the work, starring Caleb Landry Jones as man who finds salvation through the love of dogs following an abusive childhood.
