An Officer and a Spy (film)
2019 film directed by Roman Polanski
An Officer and a Spy (French: J'accuse) is a 2019 historical drama film directed by Roman Polanski about the Dreyfus affair, with a screenplay by Polanski and Robert Harris based on Harris's 2013 novel of the same name. The French title has its origins in the J'Accuse...! open letter Émile Zola wrote in 1898 in which the author accused many people of France of continuing to support the increasingly blatantly erroneous accusations against Dreyfus.
The film had its premiere at the 76th Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2019, winning the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize. It received twelve nominations for the 45th César Awards, the most nominations of any eligible film, and eventually won the awards for Best Adaptation, Best Costume Design, and Best Director. The film was also nominated in four categories at the 32nd European Film Awards, including for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenwriter, ultimately winning none. It received David di Donatello and Polish Film Awards nominations as Best Foreign and Best European film respectively. It was a box-office bomb, grossing $18.9 million worldwide against a production budget of $24 million.
Plot
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, is found guilty of high treason for passing military secrets to the German Empire. He is condemned to exile on Devil's Island; his affair triggers an echo in France since Dreyfus is Jewish.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “An Officer and a Spy (film)” is 2019 film directed by Roman Polanski. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Officer, film and directed, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “2019 film directed by Roman Polanski” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60833546. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2013, 1898 and 1894.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “An Officer and a Spy (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.