Palace Cinemas in association with Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) present a touring film season dedicated to the oeuvre of Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski.

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ROMAN: 10 X Polanski will show ten key films drawn from the director’s Polish New Wave debut, Knife in the Water to his 2010 political thriller, The Ghost Writer, by way of the director’s British films of the ‘60s, New Hollywood classics Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown and Paris-set thrillers The Tenant, Frantic and Bitter Moon.

Marina Zenovich’s feature-length documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, will screen alongside the program’s ten selected features directed by Polanski.

“Lauded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as ‘one of the great modern masters of the cinema’ Roman Polanski has over the course of five decades refined a formal film language and expressed a mordantly ironic worldview in genre-defining films that are provocative, compelling and inventive,” said ACMI Film Programmer and curator of the season, Roberta Ciabarra.

Polanski’s cinema often blurs fantasy and reality and deals with the character’s psychic life, showing dreams, memories and hallucinations as well as everyday situations that suddenly seem to be absurd and terrifying. The result is an intimidating direct approach to both the protagonist’s inner thoughts and fears and the grotesqueness of everyday society. Polanski is one of the few cinema auteurs that have elaborated a coherent, self-systematic and self-contained lifetime’s work. To better understand the situations and settings that reoccur throughout all of his movies and to see how Polanski smoothly navigates between inner, private worlds and outer, public history, watch this audiovisual essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López: