March 1943, the Krakow ghetto is being liquidated. A terrified boy watches his father marched away and hears him hiss two words: get lost. The boy slips away and survives the Holocaust by performing as a devout Catholic. That boy became Roman Polanski, and the instinct to direct his own reality to survive never left him.

This deep dive impartially reports the facts of one of cinema’s most polarizing biographies, covering immense artistic triumphs alongside undeniable crimes. We follow Polanski’s journey through trauma, exile, and contradiction, and confront the unresolved cultural debate about whether art and artist can ever be separated.

• How childhood terror translated into the claustrophobic anxiety that defined films like Repulsion
• The suffocating irony of the Manson murders of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, a horror worse than any script
• The 1977 charges, the plea bargain, and the judge reneging on the deal that drove him to flee to France
• How French citizenship shielded him from extradition while he kept winning awards, including Best Director for The Pianist
• The MeToo-era expulsion from the Academy, the Cesar Awards walkout, and his victim Samantha Geimer’s public forgiveness