Polański was honoured with the Against the Current award which is given to filmmakers in recognition of their unique artistic independence. Agnieszka Odorowicz of the Polish Film Institute and actor Andrzej Seweryn presented the award to Polański at the opening ceremony held on 1 May 2015.

Polański told the audience, “I am extremely touched by this Krakow Award. Krakow is my city.”

Polański has been planning to direct his next film in Poland, and some industry insiders have speculated that his presence at events in Poland over the past year has been a way of testing whether the director can avoid extradition from Poland to the US on a court case that dates back to 1977-78.

Polański’s next film will be an adaptation of An Officer and A Spy, a thriller by Robert Harris about the Dreyfus affair, a fin-de-siecle political scandal that saw the unjust imprisonment of a French Jew who was returned to France to face trial amid a climate of anti-Semitism and ended up in prison for five years based on falsified documents.