NEW 4K RESTORATION
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, and Polish-Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's life is forever changed. Forced into the Warsaw Ghetto with his family, they endure the horrors of Nazi brutality and starvation. Separated from his loved ones during a transport to a death camp, Szpilman survives through slave labor and assistance to the resistance.
Polanski, six years old when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, was a survivor of the Krakow Ghetto and witnessed his father being taken away to a Nazi death camp. His mother would die at Auschwitz. As Manohla Dargis wrote, "Polanski has spent his entire filmmaking career making movies that, steeped in alienation and paranoia, carry traces of the Holocaust. This time, faced with the historical event, he tempers his style, and the alienation and paranoia creep in from the outside, unescorted and relentless. With The Pianist, Polanski's strange genius serves Szpilman's remembrance."
The Pianist premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or. At the 75th Academy Awards, the film won for Best Director (Polanski), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood), and Best Actor (Brody), and was nominated for four others, including Best Picture.
Restored in 4K from the original camera negative by Studiocanal in collaboration with DI Factory.
"A tour de force of claustrophobia and surreal desperation...One of the very few non-documentary movies about Jewish life and death under the Nazis that can be called definitive."
— A.O. Scott, The New York Times