The Pianist is a 2002 biographical film produced and directed by Roman Polanski, with a script by Ronald Harwood, and starring Adrien Brody.

[8] At the 75th Academy Awards, the film won for Best Director (Polanski), Best Adapted Screenplay (Harwood), and Best Actor (Brody), and was nominated for four others, including Best Picture (it lost to Chicago).

After escaping, Szpilman and his family prepare to leave the city when they learn that Britain and France have declared war on Germany.

Szpilman finds work by performing in a cafè frequented by upper-class Jews, who smuggle in forbidden goods in order to live comfortably.

He helps the resistance by smuggling weapons into the ghetto hidden inside bags of food, on one occasion narrowly avoiding a suspicious guard.

A neighbor discovers Szpilman and attempts to report him, but he manages to escape and meets his old friend Dorota, whose husband provides him with another hiding place in the middle of the German quarter.

In January 1945, as the Germans retreat from the Soviet offensive, Hosenfeld meets Szpilman for the last time, promising he will listen to him on Polish Radio after the war.

The story had deep connections with director Roman Polanski because he escaped from the Kraków Ghetto as a child after the death of his mother.

The art department built onto these original buildings, re-creating World War II-era Poland with signs and posters from the period.

The Umschlagplatz scene where Szpilman, his family, and hundreds of other Jews wait to be taken to the extermination camps was filmed at the National Defence University of Warsaw.

[13] The Pianist was widely acclaimed by critics, with Brody's performance, Harwood's screenplay, and Polanski's direction receiving special praise.

[18] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, noting that, "perhaps that impassive quality reflects what [director Roman] Polanski wants to say.

He later said that the film "illustrates that theme and proves that Polanski's own art has survived the chaos of his life—and the hell that war and bigotry once made of it".

"[21] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the film "contains moments of irony, of ambiguity, and of strange beauty, as when we finally get a look at Warsaw and see a panorama of destruction, a world of color bombed into black-and-white devastation".

Scott of The New York Times said that Szpilman "comes to resemble one of Samuel Beckett's gaunt existential clowns, shambling through a barren, bombed-out landscape clutching a jar of pickles.

He also felt that Szpilman's encounter, in the war's last days, with a music-loving German officer, "courted sentimentality by associating the love of art with moral decency, an equation the Nazis themselves, steeped in Beethoven and Wagner, definitively refuted".

"[24] The Pianist was released by Universal Studios Home Entertainment on DVD in the US on 27 May 2003 in a double-sided disc Special Edition, with the film on one side and the featurette "A Story of Survival" on the other.

[25] The Polish DVD included an audio commentary track by production designer Starski and director of photography Edelman.

The StudioCanal Collection version includes the featurette "A Story of Survival", as well as several interviews with the makers of the film and Szpilman's relatives.