Director: Roman Polanski
Novel: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Script: Ronald Harwood
Photography: Pawel Edelman
Editor: Hervé de Luze
Production Design: Allan Starski, Casting: Celestia Fox, Heta Mantscheff
Music: Wojciech Kilar
Principal Cast: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman, Emilia Fox, Ed Stoppard, Producers: Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
Co-Producer: Gene Gutowski
Executive Producers: Timothy Burrill, Hennin Molfenter, Lew Rywin, Associate Producer: Rainer Schaper
Distribution:
TOBIS Film GmbH & Co. KG
Tel: +49 (0)30 839 007 0
Fax: +49 (0)30 839 007 65
www.tobis.de
For his most personal film, Roman Polanski returned to Poland for the first time in 40 years for a film shooting. "The Pianist" was created based on the memoirs of the Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, in which he describes how luck and the help of his admirers enabled him to survive in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Himself a child in the Krakow Ghetto, Polanski makes "The Pianist" a harrowing demonstration of how life and death came to depend on indiscriminate whims. There is no need for melodrama to accomplish that. Rather, it is the picture's sobriety that lends it its emotional impact. The film won the Golden Palm in Cannes and three Oscars.