Ken Burns’ latest, Polanski doc head to Cannes

April 19, 2012 by Kevin Ritchie

Veteran documentarian Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five and Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir are among the documentaries that will screen at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Directed by Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and David McMahon, The Central Park Five is about the 1989 Central Park jogger case in which five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem that were wrongly arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park.

In Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, the exiled Chinatown director chats with his friend and producer Andrew Braunsberg about his career, the murder of his wife Sharon Tate, and his 2009 arrest in Switzerland following an American extradition request stemming from a 1977 rape charge.

The film premiered last September at the Zurich Film Festival where Polanski also accepted a lifetime achievement award. Both films are programmed in the festival’s Special Screenings section, and were unveiled at a Paris press conference (pictured above) today (April 19).

Other docs included in the Special Screenings line-up are Journal de France, about filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon’s six-year travelog across France with his long-time partner and collaborator Claudine Nougaret; A Musica Segundo Tom Jobim, director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film about Brazilian singer Tom Jobim; and Polluting Paradise, German filmmaker Fatih Akin’s five-years-in-the-making doc about his parents’ Turkish village.

The 2012 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16-27 in Cannes, France.

Tags: A Musica Segundo Tom Jobim, Cannes Film Festival, Claudine Nougaret, Fatih Akin, Journal de France, Ken Burns, Laurent Bouzereau, Nelson Pereira de Santos, Polluting Paradise, Raymond Depardon, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, The Central Park Five