Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (2019), based off the Robert Harris novel of the same name, garnered the second-place prize Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, according to France 24. In it, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin) clandestinely reinvestigates evidence that proves Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) is innocent of the treasonous accusations against him, only for the anti-Semitic Third French Republic to suppress it in the 1890s. Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jewish journalist corresponding in Paris at the time for an Austrian newspaper, would go on to become the father of Zionism as we know it today because of the Dreyfus Affair, leading to the founding of Israel in 1948.
