Film industry figures from around the world, including Woody Allen, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese have added their names to a petition demanding the immediate release of Roman Polanski from detention in Zurich.
The director was arrested Saturday on a thirty-year-old charge of unlawful sex with a minor. He had arrived in Switzerland to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival but found himself carted off to jail instead.
The petition, coordinated by the Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), has garnered over 100 signatures from directors, actors, producers and other industry elite.
These include directors Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam, Julian Schnabel, the Dardenne brothers, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Wong Kar-Wai, Walter Salles and Jonathan Demme. Actors Tilda Swinton, Monica Bellucci and Asia Argento, as well as producer Harvey Weinstein of the Weinstein Company, have also added their names.
“We demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski,” it says.
“Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision,” the petition goes on to state.
“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him.”
According to The Guardian, Harvey Weinstein stated yesterday that he was “calling on every film-maker we can to help fix this terrible situation.”
Also, the five members of the Zurich film festival jury, headed by actress Debra Winger, released a statement yesterday, protesting that the event “had been exploited in an unfair fashion.” Jury member and producer Henning Molfenter, has now boycotted the festival. Others are expected to follow suit.
The Guardian also says that France’s Society of Film Directors has expressed concern that the arrest “could have disastrous consequences for freedom of expression across the world.”
And Polish film-makers have called on their government to prevent a “judicial lynching,” while more than 100 Swiss artists and intellectuals have signed a separate petition, also demanding Polanski’s release.
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