“It feels like we’re back in the days of McCarthyism and the Communist witch hunt,” cowardly, angrily Michèle Halberstadt, the distributor of Promenade à Cracovie, a moving Polish documentary about Roman Polanski and his friend the famous photographer Ryszard Horowitz filmed in the streets of Krakow in search of buried memories.

Response from Marc-Olivier Sebbag, General Delegate of the National Federation of French Cinemas: “It’s an amazing argument. At no time did I hear of a boycott or any pressure from the exhibition community, which has 2,000 exhibitors. When there are such problems, we are quickly informed. At the Federation, we honored Polanski ten years ago and we screened his film J’accuse at our convention in 2019.”

“For the moment, adds the distributor, we have three rooms in Paris and five in the provinces (Lyon, Grenoble, Nice, Limoges, Cachan), instead of six since a Rouen exhibitor has retracted, going to twenty- four hours from “You have to be brave” to “the pressure is too strong”. Everyone challenges each other. It’s a shame. We hope for ten rooms. I’ll know more on Monday, when the programming is closed, “she adds.

Even if Promenade à Cracovie, directed by Mateusz Kudla and Anna Kokoszka-Romer, is not a feature film but a one-and-a-half hour documentary, which has won multiple awards at festivals, it finds its place perfectly in a cinema both for the quality of its realization than by its human content: the reunion after years of two childhood friends who lived through the pogroms, the horrors of the ghetto and, for Horowitz, the Auschwitz camp, of which he was, with his mother , saved by the “Righteous” Oskar Schindler, whose journey was immortalized by Steven Spielberg.

However, there are no lamentations or tears among them, but a lot of emotions and giggles too, as if humor, so desperate at times, was the best weapon against misfortune. Cap on their head and umbrella in hand, we discover them as two facetious kids: Roman the mischievous, now 89 years old, and Ryszard the wise, 84 years old. “They are immutable,” they say, like the Church of St. Mary they gaze at while sitting outside a café.

This distant past, marked by Stalin and then by the German occupation, these former students of the Lycée des Beaux-Arts in Krakow evoke during this walk: here, the house of Polanski’s parents when they returned to Krakow after his birth in Paris; there, we discover the synagogue where he set foot for the first time, unlike his friend whose parents were very religious; further on, there is a visit to the cemetery where his dead father is buried in Paris and of which he recounts, laughing wildly, the epic journey by plane to here and the burial carried out by his friends (including the filmmaker Andrzej Wajda) who replaced at short notice the “stuffed” undertakers of a communist undertaker.

Here they are in the neighborhood – which has changed a lot – of the old ghetto where thousands of families were crowded and from which they both escaped. “I understood, old man,” Polanski told his friend, “that we were being walled in.” While his mother and sister are arrested and will die in deportation, he sees his father leaving for Mauthausen, from which he will return. Left to his own devices, the kid Roman will be taken in by a couple of Polish peasants, the Buchalas, whose grandson he will meet, moved, at the ceremony elevating his grandparents to the rank of Righteous Among the Nations. These are moments of beautiful sincerity where everyone is moved in front of the other.

“Roman, do you ever have bad dreams?” asks Ryszard. “No,” he replies, his throat a little lumpy. “We never talked about any of that,” Ryszard adds. And both of them agree, “And that’s good.” “This film is above all a tremendous lesson in life, hope, resilience given by two men caught up in the tragedy of history and who say they are happy, no doubt aware that “only the dead matter”, to use the formula by Simone Veil about the Holocaust.

“Walking in Krakow,” in theaters July 5.