Polański, Horowitz. Hometown

Director Roman Polanski and photographer Ryszard Horowitz return to Poland after almost sixty years, and talk about their memories of their childhood and youth, the hardest time in their lives, when they met in the Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis and developed their passion for art.

Two men stroll, large umbrellas under their arms, on a sunny day. They chat, they laugh, they walk quickly through Krakow. The two men are respectively 89 and 83 years old, though they look like teenagers: they are Roman Polanski and Ryszard Horowitz, a great filmmaker and a great photographer, who were childhood friends in that city and were later separated by the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Their memories resurface through the review of family photos, repertory material and above all, an uninterrupted dialogue punctuated by moments of laughter and surreality.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT The film is a portrait of Roman Polanski and his childhood friend Ryszard Horowitz. I took care to show the heroes from a different perspective, not as famous artists, but as people with a past, whose successes were preceded by their experiences of the war and totalitarianism, trauma and alienation.