Roman Polanski Won’t Preside Over César Film Awards in France
PARIS — After protests from French feminist groups, the director Roman Polanski will not preside next month over the César awards ceremony, the French equivalent of the Academy Awards, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
Mr. Polanski, 83, fled the United States for Europe in 1978 while awaiting sentencing for a conviction of having sex with a 13-year-old girl, and the announcement that he would preside over the awards ceremony had met outrage, including from a high-ranking French official.
“In order not to disturb the César ceremony, which should be centered on cinema and not on whom it chose to preside over the ceremony, Roman Polanski has decided not to accept the invitation,” Hervé Temime, a lawyer for Mr. Polanski in Paris, said in a statement.
The uproar, which Mr. Temime said was “based on false information” and had “deeply saddened” the director and his family, came at a time of heightened awareness of women’s issues worldwide. On Saturday, millions of women took to the streets around the world, including in Paris, to highlight women’s issues and to protest the presidency of Donald J. Trump in the United States.
Last week, the French minister for families, children and women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, called the decision to invite Mr. Polanski to preside over the Feb. 24 ceremony “shocking and surprising.”
Feminist groups backed Ms. Rossignol, the hashtag #BoycottCesars gained popularity on Twitter and a petition on Change.org calling for Mr. Polanski to be dismissed of his César duties received nearly 62,000 signatures.
In December, the Polish Supreme Court rejected an extradition request from the United States for Mr. Polanski. The filmmaker is a dual citizen of Poland and France, which does not extradite its citizens.
In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Temime noted that Switzerland and Poland had rejected extradition requests for the director and that the woman at the center of the legal case against Mr. Polanski, Samantha Geimer, had long called for it to be dropped.
“This polemic arose in a totally unjustified way,” Mr. Temime said, adding that Mr. Polanski has received other cinema awards and served as president of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.
The Académie des César, which oversees the César awards, did not respond to requests for comment. In inviting Mr. Polanski to preside over the ceremony, it praised him as an “insatiable aesthete” whose film artistry had constantly evolved over the years.
Emmanuelle Seigner, Mr. Polanski’s third wife, posted a video of a forest on Instagram on Tuesday that appeared to express support for her husband. “I woke up in the forest far from human nastiness and stupidity,” she wrote.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/world/europe/roman-polanski-france-cesar-awards.html
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